When there is passion in someone's writing voice, it infects me. One of the reasons I didn't pursue a scientific career is that I write in a somewhat whimsical style and would feel my soul being crushed if my career was spent churning out papers devoid of any passion or love for the field
Edit: I would also say that it's unfortunate that parts of philosophy are this hand-wavy. For instance, at one point in the paper, the author describes hallucinating that you see a letter in your mailbox as being phenomenologically just like actually seeing one. Daniel Dennett has a well known discussion in the first chapter of Consciousness Explained arguing that hallucinations are phenomenologically quite different from normal perception. Perhaps the author would say it doesn't matter, that's just a contingent fact that doesn't undermine the specific point being made, but 1) I'm not confident that argument works, and 2) either way, it should be stated explicitly.
You don't have to write in passive voice to be rigorous; I'm guessing the OP was talking about this lack of rigour.
Here's an interesting recent paper that found that roughly 30% of papers are still in the passive voice (admittedly, I was expecting a higher percentage).
You don't have to be a type setter or poet to care enough to get the basics right for your "paper", learn by example at the least.
I agree the final one posted to the web should be single spaced, but perhaps he is merely uploading the document he submitted somewhere.
The problem here seems to be witting skills. For example, this should never be a sentence: "That is the aim of section 1."
The task of the editor is never to impose their style upon the author. There are different writing styles even in academic writing, a wordy one, one that chooses outrageous words, a very terse one, and the awful MBA-style kind.
What's worst is an editor that sees a sentence that he does not understand, and edits that, thinking it's just style but completely changes the meaning.
In this case, the sentence can be easily worked into the preceding sentence which it echos - by changing the place holder clause "The first order of business is.." to "The aim of section one is..".
I once was working with a horrible boss like that. I'd write a draft of the paper, she would not understand subject or prose and change some sentences into something else, based on her limited understanding of the subject and the prose. It was excruciating. You'd read her draft full of MBA-speak and couldn't make out the meaning of some of it!
"The first order of business will be" is a placeholder used in speech, to me it has the equivalent meaning of "Uhm, I will be". Care to elaborate further on what you think the special emphasis of this phrase is in this context?
>Congratulations!
Not to edit your style bro, but the condescension is a bit much. Seems like you have just soured on editors due to some bad personal experiences. Editing is suppose to be a two way conversation in which the editor marks up all possible errors and you accept the changes that you think add clarity or just rewrite it yourself knowing that your previous version was unclear to at least 1 person.
That said, I don't really see the grey area in this case.
"The first order of business will be to draw some distinctions between these notions and pick an appropriate focus for our present inquiry. That is the aim of section 1."
"Section 1 draws distinctions between these notions, one of which will be the focus of our inquiry."
Passive voice would be "to be drawn", "to be read", etc.
Thank you.
This is a class of stylistic issue that's common in professional writing by those new to it and usually stems from a lack of confidence in the topic or in one's self.