Question:
When publishing research results, most medical journals advise authors to write using the "active" rather than the "passive" voice. The impact of the use of the passive voice in five top medical journals with differing writing style guidelines was investigated in Applied Linguistics (Dec. 2013). The five journals compared were the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), British Medical Journal (BMJ), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Using a search engine, the researchers sampled (independently) a large number of declarative passive paragraphs from each journal and recorded the number of passives per sentence (NPPS) for each paragraph. A one-way analysis of variance was conducted on the data. Interpret, fully, the results shown below.
ANOVA F = 35.5 (p-value
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Mean NPPS: Journal: .50 JAMA 38 49 Lancet .52 32 BMJ AIM NEJM