Does your writing reflect you?
Date: Sep 2003
Course: Transport Economics
Assignment: Paper Review
"Internalization of Airport congestion costs was studied by Brueckner (2002)" and a series of similar statements is how my review looked. My prof coolly said, "I guess you should take a course in technical writing". This came as quite a shock to me. Over time I realized that my prof expected "Brueckner (2002) studied the internalization of airport congestion costs" instead of what I had written.
A few days ago I was talking to my friend. We wondered why the writing styles differed so much from country to country. In India it is perfectly fine to write in passive voice. But in the US people mostly use active voice. What could be the possible reason?
In India people quite often write "This task was done by me" or sometimes just "This task was done". The emphasis is on the action and not the person who did it. Sometimes people just mention the action and thats all. However, an American would write the same sentence as "I did this task". Here the emphasis is on I. 'I' takes precedence over the action. Hmmmmm ... we started hypothesizing. Are people in India selfless enough not to mind even if they are not the priority? And, do the people in the US want to hog the limelight always? At this point the alternate hypothesis struck our minds.
When one says "I did this task", he/she might be considered as taking responsibility of the task. However, if one says "This task was done", he/she can be interpreted as shunning away from being held responsible for the task. This hypothesis also sounded perfectly fine to us.
Before we hypothesized anything else about any other writing styles we decided it was enough for the day ... and got back to research.
I guess there is nothing like "this is right and this is wrong". Had that been the case English language would have had only one of them.
Course: Transport Economics
Assignment: Paper Review
"Internalization of Airport congestion costs was studied by Brueckner (2002)" and a series of similar statements is how my review looked. My prof coolly said, "I guess you should take a course in technical writing". This came as quite a shock to me. Over time I realized that my prof expected "Brueckner (2002) studied the internalization of airport congestion costs" instead of what I had written.
A few days ago I was talking to my friend. We wondered why the writing styles differed so much from country to country. In India it is perfectly fine to write in passive voice. But in the US people mostly use active voice. What could be the possible reason?
In India people quite often write "This task was done by me" or sometimes just "This task was done". The emphasis is on the action and not the person who did it. Sometimes people just mention the action and thats all. However, an American would write the same sentence as "I did this task". Here the emphasis is on I. 'I' takes precedence over the action. Hmmmmm ... we started hypothesizing. Are people in India selfless enough not to mind even if they are not the priority? And, do the people in the US want to hog the limelight always? At this point the alternate hypothesis struck our minds.
When one says "I did this task", he/she might be considered as taking responsibility of the task. However, if one says "This task was done", he/she can be interpreted as shunning away from being held responsible for the task. This hypothesis also sounded perfectly fine to us.
Before we hypothesized anything else about any other writing styles we decided it was enough for the day ... and got back to research.
I guess there is nothing like "this is right and this is wrong". Had that been the case English language would have had only one of them.
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