by Cooper Wilkinson
Cooper is a Biochemistry major and a Cognitive Science minor who moved to Boston from Kansas City, Missouri. Cooper has always loved science, and has recently gained an interest in linguistics and the overlapping subjects of science and language. He wrote this essay during the Spring remote semester, and was proud to be able to “overcome the challenges of remote learning and grow even while the world was at a stand still.” Cooper says that he was grateful to be able to choose his writing topic and to no longer be “forbidden to write in the first person”. In addition, he is excited to prove that academic writing can also be a form of expression where students can take risks, choose interesting topics, and express themselves fully.
While we sat in silence, brainstorming ideas for the topic of this paper, my mind was completely blank. I was more fixated on the chemistry lecture across the hall than coming up with ideas. It was funny—that same lecturer was across the hall from my math class the semester before, where I would also zone out and listen to him. So, the stars aligned and into my head popped a memory from my first semester of chemistry at UMass Boston. I hadn’t taken a college-level chemistry class in high school, so my first lab report sucked. Most of all, according to the TA who graded it, the language sucked. I failed to adhere to this ridiculous rule buried in the fine print of chemistry standards: reports should be written in the third-person passive voice. My chemistry manual inconspicuously states: “Never write in the first person; third person passive voice is the proper tense… The latter is much more professional” (Lab Report Writing Style Guide, 5). When I asked my chemistry TA to elaborate, he said “that’s just the way it is.” This conflicted with my essay-writing knowledge; that same semester in English I was encouraged to write in the first-person active voice for the sake of “clarity.” I wondered why anyone would want to sacrifice clarity for “professionalism” or some silly tradition. I complied in writing myself out of my lab reports and the memory dissipated, until that fabled afternoon brainstorming where I was reminded of that same burning question: why are lab reports written in the third-person passive voice?!
My greatest fear was that a simple answer lay behind one Google search. Perhaps it simply was tradition, and no answer would ever live up to the internal turmoil and torment this question burdened me with. Much to my relief, after some preliminary research I found that there was plenty of debate and study to keep me occupied. The first major development in my research was my discovery that third-person passive is just one aspect of what many call “technical writing.” This form of writing, according to educational science professors at Uppsala University (Sweden) in their paper “Features and Functions of Scientific Language,” has plenty of features that “every day” language does not. The study conducted found that scientific language contains: ”a more extensive use of complex noun phrases with many modifiers, a specialized vocabulary and the use of the passive form and nominalizations that remove the agent and, subsequently, the need to use personal pronouns” (Persson, et al., 177). Technical writing doesn’t just include the use of the third person passive, but often field-specific vocabulary and highly complex language. This is more than apparent if you’ve ever read a scientific report—their use of massive words and complicated concepts can be like a foreign language, not just a technical one. Bolstered by my new-found understanding of scientific writing, I dug deeper to understand why this language is used in the first place.
But first, I wanted to rule out my TA’s idea that the use of technical writing was simply tradition. My search led me to a book by retired English professor Elizabeth Tebeaux, titled The Flowering of Tradition: Technical Writing in England 1641-1700, Tebeaux articulates that reports are at the heart of technical writing and carry much of its history (Tebeaux, 215). She claims that petitions were one of the earliest forms of the report, and that “petitions were documents that allowed King Edward’s subjects to approach him with their problems, their requests, and recommendations for solutions” (TeBeaux, 215). This parallels the structure of my lab reports, specifically the inclusion of a section for recommendations for solutions. Often in chemistry, further experimentation is required in order to determine concrete results, so this section takes the form of recommendations for future experiments. I was also interested in why reports took this form, and Tebeaux answers. She argues that the need for multiple copies of these old reports to be printed (by hand) meant that they had to be concise. This manifested in reports having the following characteristics: “Statement of purpose of the report at the beginning of the document,” “Conciseness and directness,” and “Page design and formatting to reveal the content” (Tebeaux, 218). While all of these characteristics are still present in my modern lab reports, I found the statement of purpose to be the most interesting. In chemistry, our first task is always to write a paragraph on the purpose of the lab. I enjoyed learning the historical context as to why we are always given this seemingly trivial assignment. While this source helped me to understand the organization of technical writings, I wanted to explore more of the grammatical concepts I mentioned before. So, I kept digging.
I came across the most interesting paper of my research: a study of code-switching between scientific language and casual language in children. Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland interviewed 539 children from the ages 3-18 to assess their language in describing every-day concepts and scientific ones (Blown and Bryce, 621). These children were asked to describe basic concepts of astronomy, like how the moon revolves around the Earth and the position of the sun in the sky. What they found was that children relied on personification and animism (highly visual concepts) when discussing these scientific concepts. To expand on this discovery, researchers asked the children to describe how the Earth revolves around the sun along with play-dough models. According to the findings, “it was not uncommon for children to change the shape of their models of the shape of the Earth from disc-shaped to ball-shaped as a result of Socratic dialogue” (Blown and Bryce, 645 ). In my head I thought, this is HUGE—it means that children’s visual and spatial perceptions shift alongside the switch from casual to scientific speech. I began to wonder if technical writing was just the manifestation of a much deeper psychological mindset. In other words, maybe the origin of this voice isn’t just from tradition, but how we subconsciously choose our words when thinking scientifically. But if technical speech and writing is inherent to scientific thought, should it still be enforced in curricula?
I found an article by chemistry professor Reuben Hudson that asks this very question. His paper “The Struggle with Voice in Scientific Writing” was a rebuttal of another paper written by his colleague Jeremy Carr titled: “Using a Collaborative Critiquing Technique to Develop Chemistry Students’ Technical Writing Skills” which proposed technical writing to be a powerful device to be used universally within the sciences (Carr, 751). In Hudson’s own words: “If we tell young chemists to write in the technical voice, they may interpret that the scientific community allows for only one homogeneous voice” (Hudson, 1580). He proposes that professors should allow their students to present scientific findings in ways that best fit their audience, regardless of whether or not that method involves the technical voice (Hudson 1580). I hadn’t thought of the scientific community as anything but one homogenous community until I read Hudson’s piece. I realized that some fields benefit from the technical voice while some might suffer. For example, as described earlier, astronomy is a highly spatial science. If the technical voice does correlate to spatial thinking as previously postulated, it makes sense that research conducted in that field would be presented technically. However, perhaps, a field like psychology that relies on intangible concepts would benefit from its own method of presentation. So maybe technical writing shouldn’t be enforced in less spatial sciences, but I wasn’t satisfied with just that. I still wanted to know if it should be enforced in my science in question: chemistry. Chemistry is a highly spatial science. Concepts such as the shape of electron orbitals and arrangements of molecules lie at its core, so it makes sense that the technical voice would be used to describe them.
It seemed as though my question had been answered, yet I wasn’t satisfied. Perhaps I’m just stubborn, but I felt that there was something wrong about this top-down enforcement of language. I wasn’t going to let my TA or my professor win so easily, so I kept thinking. I looked back at studies I had ruled out in my preliminary research and found one titled “Investigation of Passive Voice Occurrence in Scientific Writing” by professors at the University of Jambi in Indonesia. The researchers compiled scientific papers written by students and simply counted how many times they used the passive or active voice. They found that the active voice was actually used much more in students’ scientific papers (Subagio, et al., 64). Initially, I wasn’t sure how to account for this contradiction of my own experience (which is why I ruled it out) and chalked it up to the fact that this study was conducted in Indonesia, where the first language isn’t English. I have come to realize that this concept of English as a second language wasn’t a conflating factor, but the key to what I had been missing. Perhaps the reason that the active voice was used more by students in Indonesia was that the technical voice was especially difficult to learn for non-native speakers.
English has become not only the dominant language of science, but of the world. If scientists wish to be heard or peer-reviewed on a large scale, it is in their best interest to present their ideas in English. Given that English is already one of the most difficult languages to learn, the technical voice (that I and countless other native speakers struggle with) is exceptionally difficult to use correctly. This makes sense intuitively, but its best explained by Dr. Danica Salazar in her book Lexical Bundles in Native and Non-native Scientific Writing where she claims: “A large number of non-native scientists in many parts of the world are situated in this complex, English-dominated context, and many of them find their written production in this language falling short of academic expectations when measured against expert-writer models” (Salazar, 65). Scientists in various countries are marginalized and disadvantaged by the fact that English isn’t their first language. The specific struggles they face in technical writing were determined in a corpus-based study of non-native speakers’ scientific writings. In other words, Dr. Salazar and her team compiled papers already written and examined them. What she found was that non-native speakers especially struggled with “lexical bundles,” or short, commonly used phrases. Specifically in the sciences, these might be “in the presence of,” “in the absence of,” “in response to,” et cetera. According to the study: “One of the most important findings revealed by corpus-based language studies is the fact that, instead of constantly making new combinations of individual words, native speakers often depend on a stock of prefabricated, semi-automatic word chunks” (Salazar 65). These lexical bundles are used so effortlessly and fluently by native speakers that their misuse by non-native speakers stick out like sore thumbs. This allows for native speakers to unfairly determine the merit of a scientific paper’s argument simply by looking at grammar and word choice.
At least from my own experience, I’m less likely to read a piece if there are grammatical errors. The enforcement of the technical voice pushes non-native speakers to write in an non-intuitive way, which makes these errors more likely. Jeremy Carr’s words from before remain relevant in this new light: “use of the [the technical voice] paints a bleak picture of scientific writing in which individuals have no room for personal style, only one homogeneous voice” (Carr, 751). Allowing for native and non-native speakers alike to transmit their work in their own voice would allow for a wonderful diversification of thought. While initially I was preoccupied by my own struggles in using the technical voice, I have discovered that the real issue lies where I hadn’t thought to look before. I think that the same selfish mindset I had while early in my research process is what fuels this homogenization of the sciences. At long last, I was satisfied with my discoveries. What began as a simple question transformed into a deep inquiry that has granted me with real-world insight.
Works Cited
Blown, Eric, and J. Bryce. “Switching Between Everyday and Scientific Language.” Research in Science Education 47.3 (2017): 621-53.
Carr, Jeremy M. “Using a Collaborative Critiquing Technique to Develop Chemistry Students’ Technical Writing Skills.” Journal of Chemical Education 90.6 (2013): 751-754.
Hudson, Reuben. “The Struggle with Voice in Scientific Writing.” Journal of Chemical Education 90.12 (2013): 1580-1580.
“Lab Report Writing Style Guide.” Chemistry 117, University of Massachusetts Boston, pp. 5–7.
Salazar, Danica. “Lexical Bundles in Native and Non-native Scientific Writing : Applying a Corpus-based Study to Language Teaching / Danica Salazar,” University of Oxford. 2014. Studies in Corpus Linguistics ; v. 65.
Tebeaux, Elizabeth. The Flowering of a Tradition : Technical Writing in England, 1641-1700 / by Elizabeth Tebeaux, Texas A&M University. 2014. Baywood’s Technical Communications Series.
Persson, Tomas, Åsa Af Geijerstam, and Caroline Liberg. “Features and Functions of Scientific Language(s) in TIMSS 2011.” Nordina: Nordic Studies in Science Education 12.2 (2016): 176-196.
Subagio, Urip, J. A. Prayogo, and Emalia Iragiliati. “Investigation of Passive Voice Occurrence in Scientific Writing.” International Journal of Language Teaching and Education 3.1 (2019): 61-66.