Respuestas
Respuesta:A common criticism of medical writing is excessive use of the passive voice. 1-6 According to medical writing expert Anitra Sheen: 1 "Passive voice is the bane of medi-cal writing. It pervades medical lit-erature with the haze and heaviness of stagnant air. Writers sometimes use passive voice in an attempt to make their work sound scholarly and scientific, when actually they are perpetuating a writing tradition that is fraught with ponderous and obscure language." The grammatical "voice" of a sen-tence is defined by the relationship of the verb to the subject. In an active voice sentence, the subject does the acting. In a passive voice sentence, the subject is acted on, or not men-tioned. 7 The sentences "Data were col-lected by a member of our research team from patients with pneumonia" and "Data were collected from patients with pneumonia," use passive voice constructions. An active voice version of these sentences is "A member of our research team collected data from patients with pneumonia." Authors, editors, and publishers have a choice about the role of the pas-sive voice in their publications, and there is considerable debate about what that role should be. On one side of the debate is the argument that medi-cal writers should minimize use of the passive voice because it is less clear, less forceful, and more verbose than active voice alternatives. 1-6,8 The oppos-ing argument is that the passive voice should be the predominant style of most types of medical writing because the passive voice reflects the objectiv-ity of the scientific method, 6,9-12 avoids using a first person pronoun in a way that would be impolite, 1,3-5,12 and con-forms to the style with which medical peers are most familiar. 2,3,6,9 An important void in the discussion of the use of the passive voice is the lack of data about the frequency and pattern of its use in medical writing. The primary goal of this study is to fill that void by reporting the frequency of passive voice sentences from a sample of papers from 3 major medical jour-nals. Our secondary goals are to present a scientific framework for studying the passive voice in medical writing and to produce a reference that explains the passive voice issue.
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