GRAMMATICAL VOICE IN ENGLISH ENGINEERING, MEDICAL AND SURGICAL DISCOURSE: FROM INSTRUCTIONS TO USAGE

Through the analysis of scientific style manuals and “house styles”, we established the state of recommendations regarding the use of the active/passive in research articles (RAs). To verify whether the rules prescribed in manuals and style guides are followed by researchers, some recommendations regarding grammatical voice were compared with the actual use of the active/passive in the research articles. A corpus of research articles was analysed to determine the similarities and/or discrepancies as for the distribution and the frequency of passive forms. We also examined writing strategies with regard to the passive according to knowledge field.