Sainani SciWrite 2.1
Summary
TLDRIn this lecture from Week Two of Writing in the Sciences, Kristin Sainani from Stanford University focuses on improving scientific writing by emphasizing the use of the active voice over the passive. She explains the structure of the active voice (subject, verb, object) and contrasts it with the passive voice, which can obscure responsibility. Sainani provides examples and techniques to identify and convert passive sentences into active ones, promoting clarity and directness in scientific communication.
Takeaways
- 📝 **Active Voice Importance**: The lecture emphasizes the use of the active voice over the passive voice in scientific writing for clarity and directness.
- 🔄 **Active Voice Structure**: The active voice follows the 'subject-verb-object' format, which is more natural and direct compared to the passive voice.
- 📉 **Passive Voice Issues**: The passive voice can make sentences awkward and obscure responsibility, which is why it's often avoided in effective writing.
- 🔍 **Recognizing Passive Voice**: Passive voice sentences can be identified by the structure 'object-verb-subject' or by the presence of a 'to-be' verb followed by a past tense verb.
- 👉 **Transforming Passive to Active**: To convert passive voice sentences to active, identify the true subject and rearrange the sentence to 'subject-verb-object'.
- ✏️ **Editing for Clarity**: The active voice often requires specificity and can lead to more concise writing by eliminating unnecessary words.
- 🤔 **Subject Identification**: In cases where the passive voice omits the subject, the author or researchers are often implied and should be considered when converting to active voice.
- 📚 **Resource Recommendation**: 'The Elements of Style' by Strunk and White is recommended for further reading on writing style and principles.
- 🔗 **Cause and Effect**: The active voice correctly orders cause and effect, making it easier to follow the logic of scientific descriptions.
- ✂️ **Cutting Clutter**: Using the active voice can help cut down on wordiness, as it often requires more direct language and avoids unnecessary phrases.
Q & A
What are the three key principles of effective writing mentioned in the script?
-The script discusses the latter two principles of the three key principles of effective writing: 1) Use of the active voice, and 2) Writing with strong verbs, avoiding turning verbs into nouns, and keeping the main verb close to the subject at the beginning of the sentence.
What is the active voice and how is it structured?
-The active voice follows the format subject, verb, object, which is the natural way we talk and write. It can sometimes be just subject, verb without an object.
How does the passive voice differ from the active voice?
-The passive voice inverts the structure of the active voice, often placing the object before the verb and the subject, or sometimes just the object and verb without the subject.
What is a mantra suggested to remember when writing in the active voice?
-The suggested mantra to remember when writing in the active voice is 'subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object' to reinforce the natural writing structure.
Why is the passive voice considered awkward in both speaking and writing?
-The passive voice is considered awkward because it inverts the natural speech pattern and can obscure the subject or responsible party, making sentences sound unnatural and less direct.
How can you identify a passive verb in a sentence?
-A passive verb can be identified by looking for a form of the verb 'to be' (is, was, were, be, been, am) connected to the past tense of a main verb that takes an object.
What is an example of a passive voice sentence and how can it be converted to active voice?
-A passive voice sentence example is 'Mistakes were made.' To convert it to active voice, it would be 'We made mistakes.' or specify the subject responsible for the action.
Why might someone use the passive voice in academic or scientific writing?
-The passive voice might be used in academic or scientific writing to de-emphasize the subject or responsible party, to maintain objectivity, or to adhere to certain stylistic conventions.
How does the active voice help in making a sentence more direct and clear?
-The active voice helps make sentences more direct and clear by clearly identifying the subject performing the action, which can lead to shorter sentences with fewer unnecessary words.
What is one strategy to turn a passive voice sentence into active voice?
-One strategy to turn a passive voice sentence into active voice is to ask 'who does what to whom?' and then restructure the sentence to have the subject performing the action (verb) on the object.
Can you provide an example from the script where the active voice makes a sentence more concise?
-Yes, the script provides an example where the passive voice sentence 'The activation of Calcium channels is induced by the depletion of endoplasmic reticular calcium stores' is made more concise in the active voice as 'Depleting calcium from the endoplasmic reticulum activates calcium channels.'
Outlines
📝 Active Voice in Scientific Writing
The paragraph introduces the second week of a writing course focused on the sciences, led by Kristin Sainani from Stanford University. It emphasizes the importance of using the active voice in writing, contrasting it with the passive voice. The active voice follows the 'subject-verb-object' format, which is more natural and direct. The passive voice, which can be identified by the structure 'object-verb-subject' or by the presence of a 'to-be' verb followed by a past tense verb, often leads to awkward and unclear sentences. The paragraph provides examples of how to convert passive sentences into active ones, highlighting the clarity and directness gained through this process.
🔄 Converting Passive to Active Voice
This paragraph delves deeper into the practice of converting sentences from passive to active voice. It provides examples from 'The Elements of Style' by Strunk and White, illustrating how passive sentences can be awkward and unclear. The paragraph explains the process of identifying the object, verb, and subject in a passive sentence and then rearranging them into the active voice. It also discusses the importance of being specific and direct when writing in the active voice, which can help to eliminate unnecessary words and improve readability.
🔎 Recognizing and Revising Passive Voice
The paragraph continues the discussion on the passive voice, showing how it can obscure responsibility and make sentences less direct. It provides more examples of sentences in passive voice and demonstrates how to revise them into active voice. The process involves identifying the missing subject and reordering the sentence to place the subject before the verb and object. The paragraph also points out that using the active voice can lead to more concise writing by eliminating redundant verbs and nouns.
⚖️ The Impact of Voice on Readability
The final paragraph of the script summarizes the importance of using the active voice for clarity and directness in scientific writing. It contrasts passive voice sentences, which can be indirect and obscure, with their active voice counterparts, which are more straightforward and easier to understand. The paragraph also includes a note about copyright information for the program, encouraging viewers to visit the Stanford University medical school website for more information.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Active Voice
💡Passive Voice
💡Subject
💡Verb
💡Object
💡Transitive Verb
💡Intransitive Verb
💡Clutter
💡Mantra
💡Noun
💡Readability
Highlights
Introduction to the second week of Writing in the Sciences course by Kristin Sainani from Stanford University.
Emphasis on the importance of using the active voice in scientific writing.
Explanation of the active voice structure: subject, verb, object.
Advantages of the active voice over the passive voice in clarity and directness.
Mantra for writing: 'subject, verb, object' to internalize active voice usage.
Definition and structure of the passive voice: object, verb, subject.
The awkwardness and indirectness of the passive voice in both speech and writing.
Example of passive voice: 'Mistakes were made' and its implications.
Identification of passive verbs through the use of 'to be' forms.
Explanation of how to recognize the passive voice by looking for object-verb inversion.
Advocating for active voice to enhance readability and responsibility in scientific writing.
Example of turning a passive voice sentence into active voice: 'My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me'.
Recommendation of 'The Elements of Style' by Strunk and White for writing improvement.
Another passive voice example without a subject: 'She is loved'.
The impact of active voice on forcing specificity and clarity in scientific statements.
Technique for converting passive voice to active voice by asking 'who does what to whom?'.
Example of a complex scientific sentence in passive voice and its conversion to active voice.
Discussion on how active voice can lead to more concise writing by cutting unnecessary words.
Final thoughts on the benefits of active voice for directness and clarity in scientific communication.
Transcripts
Welcome to Week Two of Writing in the Sciences.
I'm Kristin Sainani from Stanford University.
Last week, we had an overview of three key principles of effective writing.
And we talked about the first of those which was cutting all the clutter, all the
unnecessary words and phrases from your sentences.
This week, I'm going to focus on the latter two principles which both had to do
with verbs. So, the first one is we're going to talk
about the use of the active voice. And then, we'll talk about writing with
verbs. Using strong verbs, avoiding turning verbs
into nouns, and keeping the main verb of your sentence up near the subject, close
to the beginning of the sentence. So, what is the active voice?
So, the active voice follows the format, subject, verb, object.
And this is the way we normally talk, right?
We say, she drives the car, she throws the ball.
It's a very normal way of talking and a normal way of writing.
And if you, as you'll see in a minute, if you change over to the passive voice, it
starts to sound very awkward. So, I really want you to start thinking
about using the active voice. And some of you may have learned or picked
up along the way the habit of using the passive voice.
So, to help break you off that habit, I'm going to suggest that next time you sit
down to write, you actually kind of have this mantra in your head.
You think, subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object.
You just kind of get that beaten into your head and remind yourself that you are
suppose to write subject, verb, object. So again, the active voice is just
subject, verb, object, subject, verb, object and sometimes it's just subject,
verb. It doesn't always have to have an object.
Alright. So, contrast that the passive voice.
What does the passive voice look like? So, the passive voice, inverts that
structure. It goes object, verb, subject or sometimes
just object, verb. And the subject is actually completely
removed out of the sentence. And you can see it's a very kind of
awkward way if you are trying to talk this way.
You would say, instead of she throws the ball.
You would say, the ball was thrown by her or the ball is thrown by her.
And you can see that's a really awkward way to talk, and so we never talk in the
passive voice. But yet, somehow, when we sit down to do
academic or scientific writing, a lot of us start to you know, talk in the passive
voice in our writing. And it's also very awkward in writing.
The classic example of the passive voice is the following sentence.
Mistakes were made. Now, notice that's in the passive voice,
because the object what was made, was the mistake, so the object starts that
sentence. Then we get the passive verb, were made,
and then there's no subject so we don't know who made the mistakes, right?
They just kind of fell out of thin air, they just happened.
Mistakes were made, nobody's responsible. So, the passive voice is a way that you
can type a sort of abdicates your responsibility, right?
And so, that's one of the reasons that it exists in the English language.
You can recognize the passive voice by looking for the passive verb.
And that verb will have two parts to it. It will have a form of the verb, to be,
that's is, or, was, were, the, then or am, and then, it will have a main verb that
will be in the past tense. And that main verb has to take an object,
it's what we call a transitive verb it has to take an object or you won't be able to
invert it into the passive voice. So, a verb that takes an object would be
again like, she throws the ball. So, the verb throws in that sentence takes
the object the ball. Contrast that to the sentence, she runs,
where you're just talking about the athletic activity of running.
If you say she runs, in that sentence, run does not take an object.
So, there's no way to turn that into the passive voice.
However, if you said, she runs the company, then you could turn that into the
passive voice because, in that sentence, run takes an object, the company.
So then, you could say, the company is run by her.
So, that's the passive voice. And you can recognize it by looking for,
again, a form of the verb to be connected to the past tense of the main verb.
And what is the, what are the two b verbs, just to remind you in case you've
forgotten, those are is, are, was, were, be, been and am.
And sometimes the be or the been is paired with something else like you might see
could be, or shall be, or will be, or has been.
But, you're looking for one of these to be verbs.
So, how do you recognize the passive voice?
So, you are looking for the passive verb, that is a verb that's a to-be verb,
connected to another verb in the past tense, or you can just look for the
structure object, verb, subject. So, you kind of figure out what's the
object in the sentence, what's subject, and have those been inverted.
And again, sometimes you'll just see object, verb, that's an easier sentence to
recognize as being in the passive voice because since there is no subject, it's
pretty obvious that that's in the passive voice.
So, you are looking for object, verb, subject, we're just object verb.
And I'm going to try to get you in the habit of, recognizing the passive voice so
that you can turn it back into the active voice.
So, here's an example of a passive voice sentence.
I took this sentence from Strunk and White it's a very classic little book.
If you want to pick up something else to read for this class, it's called The
Elements of Style. It's very short.
It's very good. So, if you have some time and want to pick
something up to read, I think you can even get that one online.
So, today I brought the sentence, My first visit to Boston will always be remembered
by me. So, you can see, when you read that out
loud, how awkward and funny sounding that is, right?
We don't talk in a passive voice. So, you can recognize that's a passive
voice because it starts with the object. So, you think about what was remembered?
The visit was remembered. So, the visit is the object of the verb
remembered. So, here's my object then you get a
passive verb and again, you can recognize the passive verb because you have a form
of the verb to be so we've got will be and then you've got the past tense of the verb
that takes the object so that's the remembered.
So, here's the verb. And then, you get the subject at the end
of the sentence, that's me, right? The subject is me in the sentence.
So, we get object, verb, subject. So, how would you turn that back into the
active voice? Well, of course, you would just say, I
will always remember my first visit to Boston.
That's a much more natural way to speak. And yeah, it's in a lot of academic and
scientific literature, we do this in our writing.
We, we give that first version. My first visit to Boston will always be
remembered by me. So, you can see how, how funny that is,
and also how hard on the reader. So, here's another example of a passive
voice sentence. So it says, She is loved, which, of
course, brings up all sorts of interesting questions like, who is loving her?
This is an example of a passive voice sentence in which there is no subject.
So, you can recognize the, the passive verb again because we have the to be verb
is, and then we have loved which is the past tense of love, which is a verb that
takes an object, you usually love something.
So, we get our passive verb there. And then, we think about, well, what's the
she in this sentence. The she is not the one doing the loving so
she is not the subject. She is the one being loved so she is the
object of the love. And who is loving her?
Well, we don't know that, that remains a mystery.
So, this is an example of a passive voice, where the subject has been completely
removed and leaving it to be, you know, somewhat of a mystery.
Here's another example of a passive voice sentence, in which the subject has been
omitted from the sentence. So, it says, cigarette ads were designed
to appeal especially to children. So, notice again, we've got the passive
verb, the word designed, and the object, what was designed, is the cigarette ads.
Now, who designed them? Well, when you read this, it's almost
like, they just kind of were designed that way.
It just happened, it wasn't intentional. Nobody did it, nobody is responsible.
It just happened that way. So, you can see again, why people might
want to use the passive voice in some cases.
It takes away the subject. It takes away the responsible party.
So, in contrast to that passive voice sentence to the active voice version,
which would be something like, we designed the cigarette ads to appeal especially to
children. So, you can see that when you turn things
into the active voice, it forces you, to then have a responsible party.
So, how do you turn the passive voice back into the active voice?
So, first of all, you have to recognize when a sentence is in a passive voice,
that's the first step. Then, to turn it back to the active voice,
you have to ask yourself the question, who does what to whom?
Who is the subject that I send it to? Who is the object?
And you want to then invert that sentence back into subject, verb, object.
In some cases, there won't be a subject, some of the editing exercises that we are
going to do, there won't be a subject so you might have to guess, you know, that
the subject is we, or the authors of the paper.
So, here's an example of a passive voice sentence that we can turn back into the
active voice. So, it says, by applying a high
resolution, 90 degree bending magnet, downstream of the laser electron magnetic
region, the spectrum of the electron beams could be observed.
So, you can see that that's the passive voice because well, first of all, we don't
have a subject here. We don't know who's doing the observing.
We know what was observed to the spectrum of electron beams, but we don't know who
was doing the observing? Then, we've got the could be, that's the
form of the verb to be, and then we've got the observe, the past tense of a verb that
takes an object. So, to turn us and went back to the active
voice, we kind of have to guess who's subject of the sentence.
Well, if this was coming out of a scientific manuscript.
Probably, it's the authors who are writing the paper.
So, they could say something, like, the active version would be, we could observe
the spectrum of the electron beams by applying a high resolution 90 degree
bending magnet. So, you have to identify the subject.
In this case, it's probably the authors, and they can use the word we in their
paper, we could observe this, to turn that into the active voice.
So, here's another example. It says, general dysfunction of the immune
system has been suggested that the leukocyte level in both animal and human
studies. Okay.
So again, this one's little more hidden. But if you kind of look at it carefully,
you can recognize that it has passive voice because we've got the has been,
that's the form of the verb to be, the suggested.
A````nd what's the object? What's being suggested?
What's being suggested is this dysfunction of the immune system.
What's doing the suggesting in this case is the studies, the animal and human
studies. So, to turn this one back into active
voice we would put the animal and human studies first and have them suggesting
this conclusion. So, we would say, both human and animal
studies suggest that diabetics have general immune dysfunction at the
leukocyte level. And notice that when I wrote it in the
active voice, I, I added this word that diabetic.
It actually kind of forced me to be a little less ambiguous.
And the active voice often forces you to be more specific about what you're talking
about. So I've now put that one into the active
voice. It's the studies that are suggesting this
finding. And then, I actually had to give it a
little bit more specificity there. It's this particular finding in diabetics.
So, here's another example. Increased promoter occupancy and
transcriptional activation of p21 and other target genes were observed.
Okay, so again, this is passive voice without a subject so we don't know so who
was doing the observing, obviously, from the context of the paper, we, we can guess
that. In this case, I am going to estimate it
was the authors of the paper who were doing the observing.
So, we would turn this into the active voice by saying we observed increased
promotor occupancy in transcriptional activation of p21 and other target genes.
And that's just a much more easier to read sentence, and all I've done is taken that
first sentence which was in the passive voice and turned it into the active voice.
And just that little change makes a big difference in the readability of that
sentence. So, here's another example in the passive
voice. The activation of Calcium channels is
induced by the depletion of endoplasmic reticular calcium stores.
So, you can see that the passive voice also is kind of like the cause and effect
come backwards, right? It's, the effect was, was caused by the,
the cause, right? So, it kind of inverts everything.
So, we have to, again, think about, well, what's the subject here and what is the
object? So, the subject, what's doing the
inducing, is the depletion of endoplasmic reticulum calcium stores.
What's being induced is the activation of calcium channels.
So, again, we're going to want to turn that around.
And turning this around, you'll see, is going to make this sentence a lot easier
to read and a lot clearer. So, we would say, depleting calcium from
the endoplasmic reticulum activates calcium channels.
And notice that I got rid of one of these extra words here because we had, you know,
that the depletion was inducing the activation, and when you put it in the
active voice, you can see that you've got to get these two verbs they induced in,
while activation is a, a noun that could have been a verb.
So, I took that activation and turned it back to the verb and I got rid of the
induced part, cuz I didn't need to kind of say, activates twice.
So, that makes that sentence a lot shorter, a lot crisper.
So, depleting calcium from the endoplasmic reticulum activates calcium channels.
It's very direct. So, that's one of the nice things about
the active voice, is it kind of forces you to be direct.
It gives you a lot of opportunities to cut extra words and to be really direct.
So, here's another example. In the passive voice it says,
additionally, it was found that pretreatment with antibiotics increased
the number of super-shedders. While immunosuppression did not.
So, notice how that sentence starts. It was found that, so again, we don't know
who did the finding. It's, you know, probably the authors of
the paper. You could try that into the active voice,
simply by saying, we found that pretreatment was, with antibiotics
increased the number of super-shedders. However, you could even be a little bit
more direct. You could even do a little better than
that because probably this is in the results section of their manuscript and
they probably don't need to start every sentence with we found that or it was
found that, they can just say what was found.
So, they can actually, you can cut out that whole little kind of clearing your
throat, it was found that, and just say directly what was found.
So, in that case, the pretreatment with the antibiotics becomes the subject.
It's the pretreatment with antibiotics that increases, that does the action, that
increases the number, of, of super-shedders.
So, we could rewrite this one in the active voice, getting rid of completely
the whole found verb to pretreating the mice with antibiotics, increase the number
of super-shedders while immunosuppression, suppression did not.
The proceeding program is copyrighted by the board of trustees of the Leland
Standford Junior University. Please visit us at med.standford.edu.
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Sainani SciWrite 1.1
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