Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.
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.
Recommend.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.