@dlakelan @jonny
Passive voice stopped being recommended for academic writing in the 1980s (sorry, couldn’t resist it!). Modern academic style is active.
But this doesn’t help readability because the filter is ‘does this sound impressive to reviewers’. I’ve had to fight for a paper more than once in a PC meeting because it was too obvious and incremental. Why was it obvious? Because the authors explained the problem so clearly that the solution fell out naturally. But you can’t come up with that clear framing of the problem until you’ve found the solution.
One of my favourite papers is like this: it starts describing a simple spinlock and then frames the problem as ‘how do we build a spinlock that minimises cache coherency traffic?’. It then shows a bunch of designs that address a limitation. The first time I read the paper, I came up with each of their solutions before I read it because they framed the problem so clearly that it was the obvious solution. Then they refined the problem based on limitations of the approach and did it again. Before reading it, I hadn’t considered any except the first approach.