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I'm still pissed at being forced to write in a passive voice in university. It's awkward and carries less information, and makes it seem like nobody had any agency, science just kind of happened on its own and you were there to observe it.
I don't know why anyone would prefer something like "An experiment was conducted and it was found that..."
To the much better "We conducted an experiment and found..."
Yeah, it's dumb. We write like normal people in academic papers too. I don't know why they ever taught it this way.
convinced some people just get off on arbitrary grammatical rules
That also sounds odd to me. I've been consistently taught in school to avoid passive voice and it was a huge struggle for me for a long time (case in point). I'm attending a college in Canada for the record.
I got taught that rule in my freshman year, but then my thesis advisor told me to stop doing that because "only old people write like that"
So I suppose academia is evolving (however you still aren't allowed to use first person speech)
Remember, it's never "your dildo," it's "a dildo."