Construing voice and agency in medical students’ writing

Active-passive voice alternation is central to scientific writing, addressed both in journal style guidelines — often simplistically — and in academic writing instruction, which highlights its rhetorical complexity. Despite existing linguistic descriptions of the passive’s discourse functions, more applied research is needed on how novice writers use it in developing academic writing. This study examines how medical students employ the passive in research article introductions, using systemic functional linguistics theory to analyse variation according to process type, Agent role and rhetorical move. Results show that in Introduction sections, passives are mostly Agent-less relational processes with categorising or literature-review functions and that ergativity — rather than transitivity — better explains passive use in scientific English. They also show how writers align with discourse conventions while simultaneously displaying individual stylistic variation.