Scientific reports are often confined to the third person perspective. Sometimes the style of writing is even further restricted to just the 'past tense' and the 'passive voice'. Writing in the third-person past tense gets easier with practise, but here are a few tips.
Just write!
Having something on the page is better than nothing, and you can always fix the tense later. For example, just write dot points of the method.
This might be:
...
Scientific reports are often confined to the third person perspective. Sometimes the style of writing is even further restricted to just the 'past tense' and the 'passive voice'. Writing in the third-person past tense gets easier with practise, but here are a few tips.
Just write!
Having something on the page is better than nothing, and you can always fix the tense later. For example, just write dot points of the method.
This might be:
I went to the library and looked up the populations of big cats over the last 200 years.
The electronic records only went back 50 years, so I had to look in some historical records as well.
I recorded all the information for lions and jaguars.
The above paragraph is neither third person, but it is in past tense. Now we just have to change the tense:
Population statistics for lions and jaguars were recorded from electronic and historical records.
Other transformations include:
"I found that" becomes "It was found"
"I poured 200mL of water into the beaker" becomes "200mL of water was poured into the 500mL beaker"
Check for third person (no I, we, etc.), check for past tense (no 'will investigate' or 'investigating').
The purpose of writing in the third person is to demonstrate the factual nature of the information. A single person, for example, shouldn't change the nature of the data.
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