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Subjectivity and the Use of Superlatives in a Research Paper

Eric Mosby - 02/22/2012

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Technical writing always differs from the writing of fiction, scholarly English Papers, opinion pieces, etc. in many different ways. One way is the use of subjective and superlative statements in order to emphasize on a point. We usually don't use such style of writing in science. Objectivity is essential in all cases. However students tend to overlook this important fact while writing their papers.

Subjectivity refers to the opinions, feelings, etc. For example, while making a decision you might write, 'We feel that the fixative was bad, because we had to face difficulty in finding flagella on our Chlamydomonas.' Another researcher might not want to risk time and his resources on the basis of your 'feelings.' While on the other hand, you might write the following, 'The percentage of the cells as compared with flagella was inversely proportional to the time that they had spent on using the fixative, which suggests clearly that the fixative was causing cells to shed flagella.' This is the information that any other scientist can use and gives it a better fact approach rather than a feeling being portrayed to someone.

Superlatives include the adjectives such as 'huge,' 'wonderful,' 'exciting,' 'incredible,' 'amazing,' etc. For example, 'the mitochondria showed an amazingly large increase in oxygen consumption after we added uncoupling agent.' Your definition of a large increase might be different from that of someone else - perhaps for us; a fivefold increase is incredible while it might differ for a different person. It is a better option to use an objective expression, such as 'The oxygen consumption was fivefold greater when in presence of uncoupler, which is a greater change from what we saw with the addition of any other reagent.'

Similarly, we don't ever write what we believe on, instead, we present the evidences and perhaps then, we suggest for strong support for a position. Particularly, we don't 'expect' a particular set of results or 'wire' a hypothesis for the purpose of predicting the results correctly. This sort of a practice gives an example of lack of objectivity.

Proof

For the evidence, see my essay on facts, hypothesis and the theories. All the requirements for the scientific proof are extremely rigorous. It is highly doubted, that any single experiment can be well controlled so that the conclusions can be regarded as proof. In fact, for results to be accepted, they must be confirmed independently. We never know that any model described by us presents an accurate picture of any of the natural processes. We can never look back to the original blue prints to check the conclusions that we made. So the data that you are presenting should strongly support a position, or it may allow them to reject a hypothesis, and they don't provide anything close to a proof for doing that. So instead of giving your opinions try to write in a style that would make your statement look like facts. The reader always believes on the facts that are presented and is not interested in opinions.