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7.2 Check your journal’s style – first person or passive
Check your journal’s ‘guidelines to authors’ to see whether you are permitted to use
we . If you can use ‘we’ then it is relatively easy for you to distinguish between your
work and others. Some journals, particularly those regarding Physics, tend to opt for
an impersonal form in the belief that science is independent of the person writing

about it. This entails adopting a lower profile and using the passive form.
If your journal insists on the passive form, you need to be extremely careful.

The most important point to remember is that YOU know which is your work and
which is someone else’s. But the readers do not! You must make it clear for THEM.

7.3 How to form the passive and when to use it

Active: We performed two tests. Blake et al. carried out one replication.
Passive ( is / was / will be etc. + past participle): Two tests were performed (by us). One
replication was carried out by Blake.

The passive is particularly useful when you describe a process, for example in the
Methods ( 16.3 ). This is because it puts the equipment, chemicals, procedures etc.

that you used in the fi rst position in the phrase. In review papers, and in other sec-
tions of research papers, for example the Introduction and the Discussion, you may
want to use the passive to describe what other authors have done, or what is already
established knowledge in your domain. In such cases you can say:

S1. Bilingual children have been demonstrated / are believed to adapt better to new situations
than monolingual children.
S2. It has been demonstrated / It is believed that bilingual children adapt…

The advantage of S1 over S2 is that the subject of the sentence ( bilingual children )
is at the head of the phrase, whereas it is delayed in S2.

Note that in formal English writing you cannot use someone, one or people to refer
either to a particular person or a generic person. This means that you cannot replace
S1 and S2 with S3 or S4:

S3 *Someone/One has demonstrated that…
S4 *People believe that…