Avoid passive voice

I’ve been reading 13 different senior theses this quarter (5 drafts of each—we’re currently on the 3rd drafts).  One of the biggest writing problems that I’ve been trying to fix is the gross overuse of passive voice. Passive voice is often overused in scientific writing, partly out of a misguided attempt to sound formal and partly to remove the people who did the experiment from the description of the experiment.  The result often sounds like the authors are trying very hard to disassociate themselves from the project.

Nick Falkner describes this use of passive well in The Blame Game: Things were done, mistakes were made:

The error is regretted? By whom? This is a delightful example of the passive voice, frequently used because people wish to avoid associating the problem with themselves.

But the whole point of a senior thesis is to show what a particular individual knows and has done (and presumably can do again).  The author must attribute every concept and action in the thesis to the right person: those ideas that come from the literature need to be properly cited, work done by others in the lab needs to be properly credited, and work done by the author of the thesis needs to be explicitly claimed.  (I’m aware of all the passive in the last sentence—see below for explanations of some acceptable uses of passive voice.)

Along with passive voice, students misuse the first-person plural, which has little role in a single-author work like a thesis. Almost the only time that “we” should appear in a thesis is shortly after a listing of who “we” are. It is ok to say, for example, “Alpha Beta and I ran alternating shifts for the 48-hour data collection period.  We collected samples every hour …”, but it is not ok to say “We collected samples every hour … “, if you did it alone, or (worse) if someone else in the lab did it and not you.  Saying “Samples were collected every hour …” sounds like you don’t know or are not willing to say who collected the samples (perhaps because it was done illegally?).

I am not going to prohibit students all use of the passive (as some writing instructors do, or used to do)—passive voice is sometimes useful. For example, passive can be used for improving the flow of a paragraph, since it allows flipping a sentence, which can strengthen the old info⇒new info flow heuristic.  This flipping of sentences is best shown with some schematic sentences: we start with

A creates B. C modifies B. D controls C.

and we can improve the flow by modifying to

A creates B. B is then modified by C, which is controlled by D.

Note that the second sentence of the above paragraph uses passive (“passive can be used …”) in order to connect better to the topic sentence.

Aside: The “we” in the middle of the paragraph above is not the multi-author “we”, which is as wrong for this single-author blog post as it would be in a thesis, but the “you-and-I” version of “we”, which is also acceptable in theses.

Students worry that if they avoid passive, then they’ll end up starting every sentence with “I”.  Certainly, starting every sentence identically would be a problem, but avoiding that problem is fairly easy, particularly if students talk about the goals and purposes of experiments, rather than just giving technician-level protocol dumps of what they did. Note that I did not use passive at all in this paragraph, and only this last sentence has “I” as a subject—forming gerunds is one good way to create alternative subjects for sentences.

Although my writing instructor’s despair about overuse of passive voice has been the theme of this post, that was not the point of Nick’s blog post—it was a plea to students (and others!) to take responsibility for their actions.  He wants people to be aware that actions have actors:

Responsibility doesn’t have to be a burden but it does give you a reason to exercise your agency, your capacity to act and to make change in the world. If all of your problems are in the passive voice, then “assignments are handed in late”, “the money ran out”, “mistakes were made” rather than “I didn’t start early enough or put enough time in or I was horribly ill and thought I could just push through”, “I spent all of my money too quickly” and “I made a mistake”.

His point is a good one (go read the whole article), but his equating passive voice with refusal of responsibility is the message I want to get to the thesis writers.  The whole goal of a thesis is to establish agency—that the writer of the thesis knows and has done certain things, so the writer should avoid using passive voice.  (I initially had written “passive voice should be avoided as much as possible”, but I didn’t trust that all my readers would get the joke—my apologies to those who would have.)

Senior thesis reading leads to learning

Reading senior theses has lead me to learning a bunch of new things—not so much from the theses themselves, which are often rather light on background information, but in trying to help students debug their problems and fill in their missing background.

For example, today I found out a little about how nitrogenases (which usually fix nitrogen N₂ to make ammonia NH₃) produce H₂—I did a search with the student to try to find the stochiometry of the reaction, and we found a paper that explained not just the reactions but what mutations had been needed to turn off the normal control of the nitrogenase, so that it would continue to be active (and producing lots of hydrogen) even when there was no nitrogen to fix.  I couldn’t see any reason for the nitrogenase to be active when it wasn’t producing ammonia, and indeed it isn’t in the wild-type bacterium.

I also helped another student look at pitch detection algorithms (for finding pulse rate from video feeds), using cepstral analysis. He’d been using FFTs, which are not bad, but which can be confusing to interpret when there are higher harmonics present.  The cepstrum is often easier to find the fundamental from, and I’m curious whether it will help with the rather noisy data he has to work from.

A third student was having trouble with non-expression of a viral protein in an archaeal host system, and I suggested looking for the viral sequence in the CRISPR repeats of the archaeal genome, to see if the strain had been previously infected by this virus and so was chopping up the DNA or mRNA they were trying to express. I didn’t know before looking whether CRISPR systems would attack RNA or just viral DNA—the article I looked at suggested that it would attack RNA as well as DNA.  I also suggested that they look to see whether the desired mRNA was actually being expressed (using cDNA and PCR), to see whether the problem was a translation problem or a transcription/RNA-processing problem.

A fourth student had questions about whether he should include an electron micrograph from the literature to show the structure of the virus he was trying to express a protein from, so we brought up the paper on my computer (with a bit of a detour, since he had mis-spelled one of the author names).  The picture was worth including for the purposes of his thesis.  We also talked about whether a particular part of his thesis writing should be given more prominence and more generally about his paragraph and section structure.

 

Reading student writing

I’m spending this quarter reading senior theses: five drafts each of 13 theses.  None of these students are working for me—I’m just running the class in which they are trying to convert what they’ve done for the past year into something resembling a thesis.  About half the class had not written anything on their projects before taking this senior-thesis seminar—a serious dereliction of duty on the part of their faculty supervisors, who should have been requiring a draft at the end of each quarter of work.

I meet with each student weekly (for about half a hour, though I seem to run over more often than not) in addition to the 1 ¾ hour weekly class meeting and all the reading and scrawling on drafts.  I’m currently spending over 14 hours a week on this 2-unit course (my light teaching quarter, as I had 8 units in the Fall and 7 in the Winter), and the amount of time will probably go up as the drafts get longer and more complete.

I know that a lot of MOOC-proponents are pushing automatic grading of papers as a cost-effective way to handle classes with over 1000 students.  Quite frankly, the idea appalls me—I can’t see any way that computer programs could provide anything like useful feedback to students on any sort of writing above the 1st-grade level.  Even spelling checkers (which I insist on students using) do a terrible job, and what passes for grammar checking is ludicrous nonsense.  And spelling and grammar are just the minor surface problems, where the computer has some hope of providing non-negative advice.  But the feedback I’m providing covers lots of other things like the structure of the document, audience assessment, ordering of ideas, flow of sentences within a paragraph, proper topic sentences, design of graphical representation of data, feedback on citations, even suggestions on experiments to try—none of which would be remotely feasible with the very best of artificial intelligence available in the next 10 years.

Providing good feedback on the student theses requires a good understanding of what the students are talking about (which I have gotten mainly from hearing years of research talks by their supervisors, since none are working on subjects within my areas of expertise) plus an understanding of what makes good technical writing.  Either one without the other is nearly useless, which is why students who worked on their thesis drafts as part of a tech writing course last quarter are not much better off than those who didn’t—the tech writing instructor knew none of the content, and so could not see when the ideas were in the wrong order, misstated, or otherwise badly presented. Misuse of jargon and incorrect presentation of data were also missed. The main advantage for the students who wrote a draft for the tech writing course is that they have more complete draft to start from, with a few of the surface errors already removed.

If even expert tech writing instructors with decades of experience can’t produce good enough feedback on student writing, what hope is there that automated programs can do anything useful?

I’m not alone in my thinking that automated feedback on student writing is an incredibly stupid idea. John Warner, in his post 22 Thoughts on Automated Grading of Student Writing, wrote

…
5. I don’t know a single instructor of writing who enjoys grading.

6. At the same time, the only way, and I mean the only way, to develop a relationship with one’s students is to read and respond to their work. Automated grading is supposed to “free” the instructor for other tasks, except there is no more important task. Grading writing, while time-consuming and occasionally unpleasant, is simply the price of doing business.

7. The only motivations for even experimenting [with], let alone embracing, automated grading of student writing are business-related.

…
12. The second most misguided statement in the New York Times article covering the EdX announcement is this from Anant Argawal, “There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback. Students are telling us they learn much better with instant feedback.” This statement is misguided because instant feedback immediately followed by additional student attempts is actually antithetical to everything we know about the writing process. Good writing is almost always the product of reflection and revision. The feedback must be processed, and only then can it be implemented. Writing is not a video game.

…

14. The most misguided statement in the Times article is from Daphne Koller, the founder of Coursera: “It allows students to get immediate feedback on their work, so that learning turns into a game, with students naturally gravitating toward resubmitting the work until they get it right.”

15. I’m sorry, that’s not misguided, it’s just silly.

…22. The purpose of writing is to communicate with an audience. In good conscience, we cannot ask students to write something that will not be read. If we cross this threshold, we may as well simply give up on education. I know that I won’t be involved. Let the software “talk” to software. Leave me out of it.

I pulled out the points that resonated most for me, but I recommend reading the whole of John Warner’s post.

Petition for human readers

I just found out about a petition against the machine scoring of essays at Human Readers (thanks to a blog post on the AAUP blog):

We call for schools, colleges, and educational assessment programs to stop using computer scoring of student essays written during high-stakes tests.

Every year hundreds of thousands of students write essays for large-scale standardized tests. The scores are used in life-changing decisions. Students are accepted into, placed within, and rejected from educational programs. Graduates are hired or not hired. Teachers are qualified, evaluated, promoted, and fired. Learning institutions are compared, accredited, and punished. Yet in a major disservice to all involved, more and more of these essays are scored not by human readers but by machines.

Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring. Computers cannot “read.” They cannot measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others. Independent and industry studies show that by its nature computerized essay rating is

• trivial, rating essays only on surface features such as word size, topic vocabulary, and essay length
• reductive, handling extended prose written only at a grade-school level
• inaccurate, missing much error in student writing and finding much error where it does not exist
• undiagnostic, correlating hardly at all with subsequent writing performance
• unfair, discriminating against minority groups and second-language writers
• secretive, with testing companies blocking independent research into their products

…

The basic premise of the petition is good: computers can’t score those aspects of writing that people actually care about, and so should not be used for scoring any essays that matter. Of course, some of the alternatives are just about as bad (like the MOOCs that use peer grading by incompetent “peers”), but I signed the petition anyway.

The bottom line is that assessment of writing is difficult, and so is expensive. If you can’t afford to pay for proper evaluation by well-trained human readers, then you can’t afford to use essays as part of an assessment. There are no shortcuts.

Student writing

In How does blogging about science benefit students?, Sandra Porter recommends that students (specifically biotech students at Portland COmmunity College) keep a blog :

My hypothesis is that a science blog for a science student can serve the same purpose that a portfolio serves for an artist or a set of articles serves for a writer.  Your blog can be your record of accomplishments.

Not only can your blog document your work, your blog can show that you can write, that you can spell (not a skill to take for granted), and can give you a chance to describe what you’ve done.

She describes her first job interview and what she is doing to avoid similar embarrassment for her students.  She has students in one class keep a professional lab notebook and bring it to interviews—showing that they can keep a proper lab notebook and providing documentation to support their assertion of knowing various protocols.

Student blogging is another approach she is experimenting with.  She encourages the students to use blogs as an on-line notebook (much like I’ve been doing on this blog for the circuits course), and to include the URL for the blog in resumes and cover letters for jobs.  If interviewers are interested, they can check out a few posts on the blog to see if the student can write coherently (a very important skill that can not be automatically assumed of college graduates) and, if there are search boxes and appropriate tags on the posts, whether the students know the protocols and equipment that the job requires.

In a subsequent post, The ten commandments of student science blogging, she talks about the guidelines she gives students for their blogs, to keep them from accidentally doing unprofessional things that would hurt, rather than, help their chances of getting a job.

The biggest problem I see with her recommendations is that the only audience she has identified for the student is a mysterious “job interviewer” whom the students have never met.  Writing for an unknown, difficult-to-imagine audience is hard. Writing for an imagined expert (an interviewer or professor) almost always brings out the worst writing, with inflated diction, misused jargon, and awkward ungrammatical sentences.  When writing to show that they know something to someone who knows it better, students stumble over nearly every sentence—leaving out important concepts and tossing in irrelevant minor points in a vain attempt to impress.

I think it might benefit the students to be given a more specific audience—one that they can picture writing to directly and actually informing of something new.  For an online lab notebook, it could be students at other schools (“look at the cool stuff we get to do here!”) or future students in the same lab (“never use the pink labels in the freezer—the glue on them cracks in the cold and the labels fall off”), both of whom are imaginable audiences.

The advice I gave in my circuits course is the standard advice I give to students: Write to students taking the course next year.  Assume they know what you knew coming into the course, but explain to them anything that you didn’t already know.  Make the report detailed enough that a student reading it could duplicate your work without having access to the original assignment—though they might have to looks a few things up on the web or in text books. (Provide pointers to appropriate readings, when possible.)  Explain not just what you did, but why, and provide warnings to help your reader avoid mistakes that you made.

Most of the students in the circuits course got this idea, and the reports were mostly coherent and directed at the right audience, though they were a little light on pointers to appropriate reading.

One thing that Sandra Porter doesn’t mention in her “ten commandments”, but which I had to really rant about in my course: “Get the details right!”  Sandra mentions spelling and punctuation, which are markers for attention to details, but the accuracy of the content is far more important. I can forgive an occasional typo (though failure to run text through a spell checker indicates a level of sloppiness that would disturb me as a job interviewer), but the main engineering content needs to be checked and double-checked, both for consistency with the lab notebook notes and for general sanity (recompute the corner frequency from the RC values in the schematic—is that what was intended?).

If you are giving a circuit schematic, every wire must be correctly connected, every component must have the correct value, and pin numbers should be correct.  The students  in the circuits course had incredible difficulty with checking their own and each other’s work for accuracy, and obvious errors (like power-ground shorts) occurred on most of the assignment first drafts.  For a biotech student, the equivalent would be getting the wrong reagent in a protocol, putting ice in autoclave, or replacing µg with mg.

The rate of errors in schematics did not drop much over the quarter, though I felt it should have.  Other writing problems (like poor audience assessment, overuse of passive, or misuse of “would”) were generally fixed after being pointed out, but the sloppiness in the circuit diagrams continued to be a problem all quarter.  By “sloppiness” I don’t mean poor drawing skills, as most of the students used CircuitLab to draw neat schematics, but semantic errors that changed the meaning of the circuits.

If anyone has ideas for improving student attention to details in schematics, I’d appreciate hearing them.