How serendipitous that this piece tracks with an experience you've been having! Yep, in academia they really do teach us to write in the most dry, passive, vague way possible, and to equate that with professionalism and objectivity. It frustrates me to know end that academics kinda sped past the complicated task of interrogating our own biases and how they skew our actions, and went right ahead to describing our actions in a disembodied way that makes accountability or critique far more difficult to pin down. It's as if by using passive language we're all lying to ourselves that our actions weren't driven by our very human, flawed agency.

I'm really thankful I started blogging early in my graduate career, because it taught me how to find and hold the attention of an audience, which does not mean "dumbing things down" in the least, it just means describing things clearly. I'm glad your friend had a writing coach with real-world communication experience in you. But it truly does drive me up a wall how much bureaucratic systems, legal institutions, and academic researchers obfuscate with passive language to the point they don't even realize they're doing it, and have no idea how to stop.