On the Use of the Passive and Active Voice in Academic Writings of Meth ods Section

摘要

Voice is an important topic in academic writing research.Despite increasing research interest,voice has remained a contentious topic.In the article:On the Use of the Passive and Active Voice in Astrophysics Journal Papers:With Extensions to other Languages and other Fields,an interesting hypothesis has been put forward:“Writers of methods sections in this field tend to use we+active when they have made a unique procedural choice or have introduced some technical innovation.On the other hand,the passive seems to be used when authors are simply following established or standard procedures.”Based on the existing research,this paper chooses to study the active and passive forms in the methods section of research articles,and we examine the frequency of the active and passive verb forms in the methods section of two linguistics journal articles.And to verify an old hypothesis:The we+active is used for new stuff,while the passive is preferred for old stuff,this paper will examine the we+active forms and passive verb forms the in methods section in two linguistic journal articles.