In article <1997Mar27.094105.5621 at clp2>, panzar at clpgh.org (Robin Panza) writes:
|> In article <5hbalo$pue at zam201.zam.kfa-juelich.de>,
|>sabine at hlrz28.zam.kfa-juelich.de (Sabine Dippel) writes:
|>|> > (whatever that is in English). In my masters thesis, I circumvented the problem
|> > by using the passive voice, which in German is okay, but in English sounds
|> > awful, at least to me.
|>|> This seems odd to me. I was trained to always use the passive ("this was
|> done", not "I did") in writing. I was told that we are reporting results, not
|> "tooting our own horns" about what ingenious people we are to have come up with
|> this experimental design. To me, both "I did" and "We did" sound silly, even
|> childish.
|>|> I know this is considered outdated by some (boy, does it make me feel old!),
|> but I've not seen a reason to change. I feel the same about grammer.
|>|> Robin K Panza panzar at clpgh.org|> Section of Birds, Carnegie MNH
|> Pittsburgh PA 15213 USA
|>
Actually, I was not referring to statements like that. Maybe I was not very
clear in my question. So here's an example from a (published in an American
journal) paper.
"... Here, we deal with a special case of granular flow, namely, that along
an inclined rough surface. ..."
Sure, one might write things like "Here, a special case of granular flow is
considered..."
Okay, I see this is a bad example - the second sentence doesn't sound any worse
than the first one.
But there's a better one: after stating what others have done, "... we consider
..."
I simply find this more natural than something like "...in this work blablabla
is considered..."
(That's a typical case where in German I would find the passive voice odd as
well).
Sure, when stating the results of what we did, we always said "it was found"
and the like - but to me it is not "tooting our own horns" when we state in
a clear manner what WE (or I) are doing - contrary to what has been done by
others so far. I think it makes things more readable and understandable. What
I mean is - sure, I can use "here" all the time to distinguish this - but some
mixture might make the thing less boring.
Am I completely wrong here?
Simply a question from a puzzled
Sabine
who never was told how to write scientific texts,
has published some papers and has never been accused of
writing poor or inappropriate English by editors.
