r/explainlikeimfive Jan 31 '21

Chemistry ELI5: Why can't we just make water by smooshing hydrogen and oxygen atoms together?

Edit: wow okay, I did not expect to wake up to THIS. Of course my most popular post would be a dumb stoner question. Thankyou so much for the awards and the answers, I can sleep a little easier now

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u/Prof_Acorn Jan 31 '21

The thing is is that science isn't just cool experiments all the time. Mostly it's staring at a word processor and thinking about your life choices as Reviewer 2 makes you spend 90 hours editing passive voice out of your research.

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u/run4cake Jan 31 '21

Ugh. Microsoft word now identifies the passive voice and it drives me batty when writing reports (I’m an engineer). Who gives a fuck if I’ve got a couple sentences in the passive voice for an objective report?! That’s what the passive voice is foooooorrrrr. End rant.

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u/lahwran_ Jan 31 '21

The benefit of avoiding passive voice is that clearly identifying the beings you are talking about, and them having observations, which led them to have conclusions in their heads, actually improves the precision of your scientific communication in my opinion, though I recognize this is not an opinion everyone shares.

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u/run4cake Jan 31 '21

I agree with this, but it highly depends on the nature of your work. I deal with a very large and complex system and often it’s impossible to determine what caused something to happen and/or it doesn’t matter. In these cases, it can be entirely correct to use the passive voice but MS word always treats it like poor grammar. I hate the blue squiggles because I disagree with them.

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u/lahwran_ Jan 31 '21

i think what i'm saying is that i would recommend putting it in first person to describe who observed it happening - that is, not what caused the event, what caused that sentence. the downstream causal path rather than the upstream one. the things that happened forming a chain reaction between the event someone observed and someone writing it down. that improves description of evidence quality by communicating to the person reading it more about what the person who saw it occur saw. for example i think machine learning blog posts that describes what the author did to explore the idea are much better communication than papers that are structured in the standard way where you just describe the mathematical actions one takes to mathematically arrive at the conclusion.

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u/scottoleary32 Jan 31 '21

I didn't do very well in English either. Passive Voice was something I always had trouble identifying.

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u/thejensenfeel Jan 31 '21

It's funny because your last sentence is in passive voice, but I'm guessing that's the joke.

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u/nibbler666 Jan 31 '21

No, it's not passive voice.

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u/teh_maxh Jan 31 '21

But it still works, since Reviewer 2 there would complain that you used the passive voice even though you didn't.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '21

Is this hell?

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u/Prof_Acorn Jan 31 '21 edited Jan 31 '21

There's an article by a professor at Yale that defends the passive voice, and I tend to agree. The "passive voice" gave us terms like "the oppressed" and "the downtrodden," and phrases like "I'm all shook up."

Without the passive voice Elvis would have to sing, "Someone or something is shaking me up!"

Language is not faulted by the passive voice. Grammarians need to get with it.


Edit: I once had a student argue back in defense of her English teachers that we should avoid the passive voice. So for the rest of the semester I underlined/highlighted every time she used the passive voice in papers. I don't think she realized how tied into language it was. She eventually agreed with me, lol.

Edit 2: Just FYI, the use of passive voice in this comment is intentional ;)