Minton Timothy D
Department of English, Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan.
Keio J Med. 2015;64(1):1-10. doi: 10.2302/kjm.2014-0009-RE. Epub 2015 Mar 6.
Few medical journals specifically instruct authors to use the active voice and avoid the passive voice, but advice to that effect is common in the large number of stylebooks and blogs aimed at medical and scientific writers. Such advice typically revolves around arguments that the passive voice is less clear, less direct, and less concise than the active voice, that it conceals the identity of the person(s) performing the action(s) described, that it obscures meaning, that it is pompous, and that the high rate of passive-voice usage in scientific writing is a result of conformity to an established and old-fashioned style of writing. Some of these arguments are valid with respect to specific examples of passive-voice misuse by some medical (and other) writers, but as arguments for avoiding passive-voice use in general, they are seriously flawed. In addition, many of the examples that stylebook writers give of inappropriate use are actually much more appropriate in certain contexts than the active-voice alternatives they provide. In this review, I examine the advice offered by anti-passive writers, along with some of their examples of "inappropriate" use, and argue that the key factor in voice selection is sentence word order as determined by the natural tendency in English for the topic of discourse ("old" information) to take subject position and for "new" information to come later. Authors who submit to this natural tendency will not have to worry much about voice selection, because it will usually be automatic.
很少有医学期刊专门指导作者使用主动语态并避免使用被动语态，但在针对医学和科学写作人员的大量写作手册和博客中，此类建议却很常见。此类建议通常围绕以下观点展开：被动语态不如主动语态清晰、直接和简洁；它会掩盖执行所述动作的人的身份；它会模糊语义；它显得浮夸；科学写作中被动语态的高使用率是遵循一种既定且过时的写作风格的结果。对于一些医学（及其他领域）作者滥用被动语态的特定例子而言，其中一些观点是合理的，但作为总体上避免使用被动语态的论据，它们存在严重缺陷。此外，写作手册作者给出的许多不当使用被动语态的例子，在某些语境下实际上比他们提供的主动语态替代形式更合适。在这篇综述中，我审视了反对使用被动语态的作者所给出的建议，以及他们一些“不当”使用的例子，并认为语态选择的关键因素是句子词序，这由英语的自然倾向决定，即话语主题（“旧”信息）占据主语位置，而“新”信息随后出现。顺应这种自然倾向的作者无需过多担心语态选择问题，因为这通常会自然而然地实现。
