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Tense Ron Graham with Tim McGee and Pat Baney |
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Much scientific and technical writing is in the past tense.
The rule of thumb here is pretty simple: if you're writing
about an event that happened in the past, you write about it
in the past tense. If it's still going on (e.g. some
phenomenon or natural law), you write about it in the
present tense.
While you don't want to bounce around in tense between past and present, you do want to report what's taken place in the past as past, what's still happening in the present as present. "Kepler SHOWED that there IS a relationship between orbit radius and velocity for elliptical orbits." Much scientific and technical writing also involves reporting on experiments, and results are written up before the rest of the report. I confess that I don't understand this, despite a long career as an engineer. Are we saying we know the results before we gather them? ALL the results? That sounds to me more like "faith" than "experimentation."I'm also not sure whether writing results first and writing in the past tense are totally unrelated phenomena. It's possible that a (usually correct) tendency to describe events in the past tense is leading us to write about things that haven't happened (from our point of view as writers) as though they have. What we call academic writing is a far from natural thing. Unlike simple narrative, it starts from the conclusion and works backwards. We (hopefully) say that up front. It's not necessarily bad, but it does present a source of confusion for novice writers of research and a challenge for those who would teach novices how to write up their research. We perform events A through Z, and then write what appears to be a narrative of events A through Z, when in fact, it is a narrative of events Z through A that is artfully made to appear as a narrative of events A through Z. Do we have to? References
Dolphin, W.
"Writing
Lab Reports and Scientific Papers." |
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