As a group, scientists are not widely admired for their prose style. To no small extent, this derives from their insistence on the passive voice, that boogeyman of basic composition classes. Nevertheless, the style has its defenders: Two experts in scientific style recently took to Reddit to
debate the convention, taking positions for and against the passive voice in scientific writing. Their conversation reveals that quarrels about the active and passive voices have more to do with the way our culture discusses science than they do with arbitrary quirks of style.
