Cohesion and Clarity
12- 11
Weak: The patient’s condition showed improvement after the second round of BEP. Better: The patient’s condition improved after the second round of BEP.
√ Use first-person voice rather than third-person voice.
Many writers avoid personal pronouns like “I” and “we,” thinking that first person is informal and less objective. However, in writing your paper, using first-person pronouns is appropriate and can be an important signal for distinguishing your work from someone else’s.
Weak: The authors performed biochemical analyses.
Better: We performed biochemical analyses.
√ Use active verbs rather than passive verbs.
Active verbs are concise and direct. Why is this? In English, the natural word order is subject-verb and subject-verb-object. In both patterns, the verbs are active verbs.
subject- verb : The tumor grew.
subject- verb -object: The mice ate a high-calorie diet.
Passive sentences reverse the natural word order of English; in other words, the object moves forward and becomes the subject:
original object - verb -original subject A high-calorie diet was eaten by the mice.
Notice the differences in the active and passive sentences. First, the passive sentence is longer (and as you will see later in this chapter, readers of English prefer shorter sentences). Second, the passive requires the use of the verb to be ( is/are, was/were ), a weak verb; thus, passive sentences are naturally weaker. There are times, of course, when a passive verb is appropriate. In the examples below, the doer is unknown, unimportant, or less important than the result:
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