[cbgb]

Philosophy/(Pure) Math double major here.

I would argue that my Math degree made me a "better" writer than my Philosophy degree did. Writing quality in philosophy is generally much poorer than other disciplines; you pretty much have to use passive voice everywhere, which is the first thing your college writing lab will tell you not to do.

On the other hand, in my Math classes, I had to turn in 5-10 pages of proofs every week/every other day for problem set work. It was this work that taught me how to write clearly and parsimoniously, much more so than my Philosophy courses.

Of course, YMMV.

[GarrisonPrime]

This proved to be the case for myself as well, when going through medical school and practice. I discovered I have a pretty good knack for breaking things down to their core principles and presenting them in a succinct, logical manner. I gained a reputation as the guy who could help explain complex medical issues to patients clearly and simply. I credit my undergrad years as a math major with this wonderfully useful skill.

[_delirium]

Where in philosophy is using passive voice common? At least in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, first-person active voice has been the norm for decades, since the days when in other fields it was seen as too informal to start a sentence with "I". Even today, scientists love to write things like "three types of experiments were performed to test this hypothesis". While a philosophy paper is more likely to contain active-voice, first-person sentences like "I present an internal problem for David Lewis's genuine modal realism" [1].

As a computer science major with a philosophy minor, I personally found my philosophy minor much more useful in learning how to write clearly than my CS major was.

[1] Arbitrarily chosen example from a recent abstract http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/499/627.abstract

[cbgb]

The idea that passive voice is used in philosophy doesn't seem to be a novel idea [0].

For what it's worth, I don't think undergraduate CS degrees develop students' writing abilities at all. There are only a few proof-based courses I can think of, and those courses (e.g., Theory of Computation, Algorithms) need not necessarily be taught in a mathematically rigorous manner (which is to say, proof writing in these courses may be minimal, depending on the instructor).

[0] http://wehaveneverbeenblogging.blogspot.com/2010/02/on-activ...

Edit: grammar!

[pdabbadabba]

Yes. My mileage definitely varied. There's no doubt that there is bad philosophical writing out there, but I've never met anyone (until today!) who thinks that philosophical writing requires or encourages the passive voice. It may be that the passive voice is harder to avoid in Philosophy than in other disciplines, but avoiding it is a useful exercise. That's how you improve!

And at any rate, I don't believe I ever claimed that a Philosophy degree was the best way to develop your writing.

[tannhauser23]

What philosophy program is this? At my school the professors explicitly told us to write in active voice. Also, what material are you studying? It's been a while since I've been in school, but most analytic philosophy material I read were written in very clear and precise prose.

[cbgb]

See, e.g., Quine's "Translation and Meaning,"[0] as well as the blog post I linked to further down the page. Not every philosophy program consists solely of analytic philosophy; continental philosophy writing is rife with passive voice.

[0] http://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/quine.pdf

[pmoriarty]

There's a lot of poor writing in philosophy all around. Passive voice is far from the only authorial sin. Dryness, obscurity, long-windedness and lack of engagement with the audience are probably the most common.

This poor writing is certainly not limited to any particular philosophical discipline, or even to philosophy in general. Math and science tend to be just as bad (often even much worse, except sometimes on the issue of clarity -- at least as far as their intended audience is concerned).

I think the common laborous style comes from the desire to seem "objective", the tradition of presenting very long, drawn out arguments in a "logical" fashion, and the attempt to efface the author from the work (so as to make the argument seem to be self-evident given the premises, and not at all biased or based on one person's experience or opinion). That's hard to do in an engaging manner.

More recently, the practice of revealing who the author is and where he stands is starting to become a little more common. That helps to make the writing more engaging and helps the reader to make more of a connection with the author, but I think this still is very much a minority style. Most of philosophical writing is still mired in "objective" style, and it's difficult to foresee when or if it'll ever make it out.

PS: I'm guilty of this myself, and should really take some writing courses! :)