Our goal as communicators is never to impress people by using fancy language. And it's now very clear who's doing the recruitment, the clinic staff is doing the recruitment. Whereas if we reorganize this we could say, clinic staff recruited participants by et cetera. Here's another example, participants were recruited using, wait, who's doing the recruitment there? It's not clear because this actor, the person or organization doing the recruitment is not actually in the start of the sentence. We analyzed the data using linear regression models. We, we meaning the study team, we meaning the authors of this paper or this report. Whereas you can be pretty clear if you just flip this around into the natural structure of an active voice sentence. But who is doing that analysis? It's not clear, right. All right, so a passive voice framing of data analysis might be, the data were analyzed using linear regression models. When you're clear about those things, it makes for clearer science and clearer science communication. The truth is, science can be written almost entirely in active voice, by being clear about who measured, who answered, who analyzed, who tested, et cetera. It prevents other audiences from being able to understand and use the science that we do, the health information that we have that is of relevance to our target audiences. This tendency to use the passive voice in academic writing and speaking is part of the reason why academic writing is rarely read by non-academics. Personally I think that's completely wrong. Now, in the past, some academics have felt that use of passive voice was appropriate in scholarly writing, because it made it seem scholarly and it took the emphasis off of the scientist and put it more on the action or on the finding of the science. Because you have to do this mental work to figure out who is the person, or the organization, or the government agency who is doing the action. That makes it much more difficult to read and to process especially if you're hearing it. You have the object coming first and you have to wait to figure out who the subject is, who's doing the action. Now, notice that the passive voice is flipped around from the natural order. So in this case with might be, blood levels were measured by the county health department. You can convey the same information in a less clear way if you happen to use passive voice, and passive voice sentences reverse that, it flips it around, so that the subject of the sentence, the first part of the sentence that we see or hear is in fact not the actor but the object of the action. Who's measuring blood levels? The county health department is. So for example, the county health department measured blood levels. the actor and the sentence be the same thing. So, what do I mean by that? So, active voice sentences are sentences that have the subject of the sentence i.e. Specifically using the active voice, instead of passive voice when you're writing. So now, we're going to talk about ways to make your writing or you're speaking clearer, sentence by sentence. Foundational Skills for Communicating About Health Course Transcript
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