When I taught writing in grad school, I actively (pun intended) pushed students away from passive voice. Active voice is generally easier to read, and typically forces the writer to clarify more things within a sentence. There are, of course, certain instances where passive voice better suits the context.
Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.
Interesting that there was teaching on how to write at all. In my technical PhD in Germany we had zero instruction on writing other than feedback from the prof near deadlines. You're just supposed to pick it up by reading papers (plus the experience of having written a bachelor and master thesis where you're guided by a PhD student who may themselves not be great at writing).
When I went to uni in Sweden, there was a mandatory course in academic writing as part of CS program. The learning objectives was more than just a styleguide proofreading by supervisors though, as methodologies, data collection and paper structures was covered. Pretty much the scientific process really.
This seemed to be quite needed for students to get up to speed. I was from Finland, where this subject was brought up before uni.
For what it's worth, I remember my supervisor calling bullshit on my then dense and overly academic writing and I thank them for it. It was a process of un-learning bad patterns or preconcieved notions about the writing process.
We have seminar courses for this where master students do some lit review (mainly based around one paper) and present that work in a longer form writing.
This is also "just" learning by doing. There is some back-and-forth with PhD students who help with the structure, but there's no explicit instruction.
Oh good god :) Picking up writing from reading the average paper is likely injurious to the health of your future readers. Few papers are well-written and you're likely to unknowingly pick up bad habits from reading the average paper. If your advisor was actively training you in good writing and providing you critical feedback on sentence construction, paragraph organization, the flow of ideas from one section to the next, then sure, you wouldn't really require a class. But I doubt the average advisor has the bandwidth for such feedback, esp. in my field of biology.
In the context where I taught, most students coming into the PhD program had no training in writing whatsoever. The first round of essays that people turned in were typically very poorly written. Most folks really needed the training in my view.
I mean, you wouldn't emulate the average paper though, but the ones from the best labs in your field, the papers that get awards etc.
I think it's actually better to seek writing advice on the Internet (not from randos, but if you're cut out for a PhD you should be able to tell apart crap advice from good ones.) I'm pretty sure it's better than whatever my university could offer as a course.
And just as everywhere, 90% of everything is crap. Perhaps more than 90% of papers are crap and 90% of academics have nothing to say and write terribly to hide it.
Fair enough. It does sound like you fall/fell on the more advanced side of the grad student curve though. +1 on 90% of papers having nothing much to say.
> typically forces the writer to clarify more things within a sentence.
Hmmm I don't think that's the case at all – if at all, active voice is less clear and "sloppy". (See the examples I mentioned here[0].) But maybe we interpret the term "clarify" in different ways?
Right, I would say that's just sloppy writing in general and not sloppy because of the use of active voice (and certainly an example where passive voice is better).
You're right in terms of what I meant by "clarify", which was more about writing that looking less "sloppy". The examples I think about aren't ones where the investigators are referring to themselves by "We" but where you're writing a paper about molecules interacting with each other. So something like "A activates B, which in turn inactivates C" reads more smoothly than any of its passive-voice counterparts.
> So something like "A activates B, which in turn inactivates C" reads more smoothly than any of its passive-voice counterparts.
Yes, because there is a clear subject and the fact that one thing activates another is important (at least in scientific papers, causality is kind of the point). Using the passive voice in this case is clumsy and awkward. On the other hand, there are legitimate cases for the passive voice when the subject is unclear/unknown/unimportant. Forcing the active voice then results in the overuse of meaningless pronouns or vague words just because there needs to be a subject. Good writing is using the right construct, which depends on context.
Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.