I was taught, in grad school, that manuscripts and grants had to be written in passive, subject-less text.

No.

My advisors and teachers taught me, in grad school, that manuscripts and grants had to be written in passive, subject-less text.

The reasoning: this is technical fare, about the science and not the person. I mean, yes. But also, people are your readers, and I promise, even expert scientist readers are people first.

The emphasis on passive voice leads to phrases such as the one I highlighted last week: “This project will elucidate…”

Projects don’t do much, y’all. You, the scientist, does. You draw the conclusions, you interpret data, you put words together and combine findings from multiple studies to clarify a mechanism or, if you must, elucidate something.

This comes up a lot in sections where there is a lot of intense methodology: “The cells were treated with 5 ng of drug for an hour before being washed with a saline solution and transferred to a blah blah blah.” I imagine a Mickey Mouse sorcerer with his magic wand and orchestral music. As if lab ghosts appeared and, magically, the cells were found treated and washed themselves and transferred themselves.

“We treated the cells” is totally fine. I promise. Ok, I suppose I cannot promise you that some stodgy old originalist won’t wrinkle their nose at the use of personal pronouns.

In a grant proposal, you can also say things like, “We will recruit participants from patients seen at the City Clinic,” rather than again those ghost clinical research staff who can mysteriously consent patients and give you sentences like, “Participants will be recruited from the City Clinic.”

I’m pretty guilty of some of these, especially when reviewing, because it’s such a typical thing in scientific writing. And text gets recycled, and it’s “good enough,” so no one changes it.

But you don’t want to be just good enough, do you?