I taught Biology for thirty years, and grammar and spelling did count in addition to the actual knowledge presented.
One year myself and another teacher (English) were partners in a course that was based on science literature rather than the classic based literature course. Sadly, I was much more demanding regarding writing skills than my partner.
It seems to me that being able to write well is a basic requirement in any field; your thoughts may go unread if you write poorly.
I was always taught that the only excuse to use passive voice was when it places someone or something of personal importance into the subject, and does to to avoid the appearance of clumsiness or abruptness. For instance:
“A car hit my dog.”
“My dog was hit by a car.”
Though passive, the second sentence is actually preferable; the first is too abrupt. The important part of the sentence is my dog, not the car.
That’s the ONE situation where passive voice is preferable. And even then it’s likely overused:
“Robert Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.”
“Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy.”
I’m not certain #1 is better than #2. In that case it’s a close call. Robert Kennedy is more important than Sirhan Sirhan, but it’s not of personal importance to me or, probably, the reader.
There’s not such a clear divide. Having within reach a significant recent article in a major musicological journal, I read through an entire randomly-selected page without getting out of the passive voice. I don’t think it’s just a collective bad habit, as JustThinkin’ suggests, but maybe the principal actor in one scene doesn’t merit any prominence in the wider scheme of things?
I think the idea that there is no excuse for passive voice, ever, is absurd. It exists because it’s useful. It’s one of those prescriptivist screeds that even the prescriptivists forget is such a big deal when they are writing. (Or speaking, for that matter.) Of course, it’s important to avoid overusing the passive voice–that is what needs to be taught. Teaching kids (or college students) that it is That Voice Which Must Not be Used is like teaching them that smoking pot will make them shoot up the school: all it does is leave the victims of the lesson more confused and ignorant than before.
As for the question in the title, yes, absolutely, it’s dangerous. People in the professional world need to know how to communicate effectively through the written word. FTR, when I went to the University of Arizona, it was their stated policy to require writing in all subject fields and grade for grammar (at least to some extent).
The other somewhat-related problem I see at my school is that the English writing center’s “tutors” don’t seem to actually teach anyone anything, they just correct papers. It basically amounts to a free 100% in grammar and spelling for anyone who asks for it. That’s an issue too.
Forty-four posts, and no one has called the OP for “alright”? 
I majored computer science and mathematics, and I’ve worked for several years as a programmer; and I must confess that people have told me that my writing confuses them. I doubt, however, that the problem is with my grammar or punctuation. I’ve found the most significant problem is that the audience lacks familiarity with the content; it’s often difficult to place oneself in the audience’s shoes and forget what one already knows.
The second most significant problem is actually a matter of style. For instance, consider the sentence I’ve written below:
Besides lack of familiarity with terms like “mean” and “standard deviation”, I’ve found that many people have trouble dealing with words that express inequality, such as “at most”, “at least”, “no more than”, “no less than”, “less than”, “greater than”, “3 or fewer”, and “3 or more”.
Another problem is that many people have trouble with multiple restrictive phrases. However, I often must specify the entities that I’m am talking about very precisely. I could write several sentences introducing each entity before I talk about the relationship between them; but if I did that, my writing would grow to a tedious length. I could introduce mathematical symbols that would allow me to express my idea concisely and precisely; but that would make most people’s eyes glaze over. I could omit details and risk the possibility of ambiguity, hoping that the audience can infer what I left out. That’s the strategy I chose in the above quote. Ideally, I would have specified that the standard deviation is for the number of sales for the last 30 days, that the mean is for the number of sales for the last 30 days, and that the “last 30 days” does not include the current day. Also, instead of using “likewise”, I would have specified the conditions for the number of valid sales and the number of duplicate sales in full.
I’ve also found that people have trouble with logical connectives and quantifiers. For instance, I remember someone not understanding me when I told her, “We will show the item if the condition holds for at least one distribution.” She did not understand me until I rephrased that sentence in the contrapositive: “If the condition holds for no item, then we will not show the item.” I found this quite puzzling, because to me the second sentence seems harder to understand since it contains two negatives.
I really question how much of a deal the whole “kids can’t write these days” meme is overblown. This quarter was my first time as an American TA, it was a junior level engineering class at a large state university, required for everyone in the major and a good mix of domestic and international students.
Going into it, I had a lot of apprehensions but overall, I’ve been stunned with the level of writing acumen displayed. There hasn’t been a single paper which I would call atrocious, maybe 3 or 4 people in a class of 40 who I would classify as struggling but this was largely due to their evident foreign status. For the rest of the students, I’ve had nothing but concise, well written, grammatically correct if occasionally stunningly dull papers.
I can’t be too abnormal in this regard. Is anyone else here perfectly ok with the level of writing their students exhibit?
Several of the essays I’ve had to peer-review in English classes have been absolutely atrocious. I’m sure it varies a lot by state and by school, BTW–California is known for its abysmally shitty public school system, especially in comparison to its awesome community college and state university systems, so the locals don’t necessarily come to school fully prepared to live up to that school’s standards.
While I was a student in a writing-intensive major, I saw my share of really, really bad writing. But I think there are some reasons for this. These are true for Pennsylvania, but some of them are probably nationwide, if not universal.
First, the emphasis on the five-paragraph essay in high school and freshman composition has to stop. I understand that it’s a standard format, and I understand that that format is a requirement for the statewide standardized test. Unfortunately, it’s an example of form over substance; it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you’ve got perfect form. As I’ve said time and again, do you want to be “correct” or do you want to be understood? English composition emphasizes the former, technical and business communication the latter.
Second, many teachers view the rules of grammar as absolute. Never using passive voice is a good example. As Hostile Dialect pointed out, passive voice exists for a reason, and I can think of two good reasons to use it: when something is not capable of acting on its own, or when the actor is not essential. Always using active voice can lead to some very tortured sentences that would have been clearer in the passive.
Third, I think the lack of consistent style even within the disciplines is an issue because it leads to confusion, particularly with respect to punctuation. For example, my field of communications requires APA style, which involves one set of rules, but I’ve had to use MLA, Chicago and Associated Press, each of which has its own rules. I know I’m never going to use MLA or Chicago again, so I’m not willing to invest the time and energy to learn those two, and I’m sure other students don’t want to, either.
Finally, as others have said, there is a significant lack of attention to technical and business writing, forcing students to adapt freshman composition skills to areas that really aren’t suited for that kind of writing. For example, I knew science majors who had gotten As in college writing, but who couldn’t write a simple lab report because they never had to take a technical writing course, nor did the professors within their respective departments bother to go into it. I know time and expertise are finite resources, but there is no reason not to include a technical writing course, at least for those in the hard sciences.
Robin
I frequently edit highly technical content and freely admit that I don’t understand always understand it. Understanding it isn’t necessarily my job. However, I apply the “gist” test – if a non-technical person like me can get the gist of it, then it’s probably written pretty clearly. If I have to read it over and over to figure it out, then I’ll rewrite it and mark it for the SME to check for accuracy.
I can see several ways you could write this more clearly. It’s not bad – I get the gist – but it’s wordy. Any sentence that contains both a colon and a semi-colon should be rewritten. 
I agree. Passive voice can be a useful tool, but too many people use it as their default voice. One book I read recommended forcing yourself to write in all active voice until it becomes a habit, *then * allow passive voice to creep in when it’s useful.
As much a stickler as I am for using active voice, I know my speech is mostly passive and that I write more passively in casual communications. It really seems to have become the default of American English (listen to the news for it). Someday I ought to start a thread about whether the preponderance of passive voice in communications affects how we interact with the world. 
I just wanted to point out that you (almost) wrote a perfect five-paragraph essay there. You just forgot your summary paragraph (and you added one more main point, but that’s OK).
I agree that the five-paragraph essay is not the be-all and end-all. But, I’m glad my high school pounded it into my skull. I might have been lucky in that they beat it into us in our freshman and sophomore years, and then forced us to grow out of it. I think the format–make a statement, back it up with evidence, start new paragraphs for new ideas–is a great tool. My composition teacher, at least, did not emphasize form over substance. He was a tough sonuvabitch on form, but it was always in service of the substance. He was a great teacher, by the way. Thanks, Bojo!
With this one point I don’t agree. In scientific writing, for example, the passive voice is appropriate more often than in creative writing, just as in daily news journalism. Maybe you’d call this simply a matter of “style,” but it’s a grammatical function.
But as to the OP, I find it really annoying when undergraduates in fields like engineering, science, and architecture say, “I don’t care about writing. It’s not important in my field.” Architects, engineers and scientists do a whole lot of writing, and often their jobs depend on it.
In fact, there’s a book by a guy named Bruno Latour (Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, 1986, Princeton University Press) wherein he describes how most of what scientists at the Saulk Institute do is writing.
I remember reading about some professor complaining about how “modern” undergraduates couldn’t write anymore.
He was a professor at Yale. 130 years ago.
I assume you’re probably referring to the need for objectivity? In my experience, most passive sentences can be written in active voice without sacrificing objectivity a bit. My experience includes technical, scientific, and business communications. As a reader, I think it holds true in news, too. Passive voice is just a habit and a crutch in most situations.
Some random thoughts, in no particular order:
Yes, I think instructors across the curriculum should hold students responsible for writing competent English. It’s difficult for students to make a persuasive argument or disseminate information in any discipline without convincing their audience that they have something worthwhile to say, and being able to write clear and literate prose is one element in establishing their credibility.
Very often, there’s a mismatch between what faculty in other disciplines expect freshman composition instructors to teach and what these instructors actually do teach. English professors, in general, are less likely to emphasize the mechanical correctness of students’ writing than faculty in other disciplines. People who specialize in rhetoric and composition are less likely to emphasize mechanics than other English instructors. In other words, instructors who have NOT had formal training in teaching writing tend to care more about surface-level errors; those who have such training tend to pay more attention to the larger issues of content and organization – evidence, argumentation, analysis, coherence, focus. In fact, when I was in mandatory comp-instructor boot camp in grad school, we were actively discouraged from offering formal instruction in grammar, on the grounds that research had shown that such instruction had absolutely no effect on students’ writing. I’m agnostic about whether this is true (I’m skeptical about a lot of rhet-comp research), but I do agree that the freshman comp instructor’s primary job is teaching students the higher-level skills that they’re going to need in most of their college classes, such as how to tell the difference between a scholarly article and a Wikipedia entry, how to write a thesis that makes a clear and arguable point, and how to read a text critically. Much of the work that comp teachers do is invisible if you’re looking only at grammar and mechanics, or if you’re placing undue weight on one particular pet peeve, such as passive voice or redundancy.
What counts as “good writing” in one discipline may well be horrible writing in another discipline. Scholars in the humanities encourage active voice, discourage formulas, and generally have no problem with limited use of first person; the standards for a lab report in the sciences are entirely different. I prefer that my literature students use MLA-style parenthetical notations (although I’ll accept ANY citation style as long as it’s used consistently); my undergraduate history professors hated parenthetical notes and wanted Chicago style. I want students to quote extensively from the texts we’re reading because they are primary sources and the students are supposed to be doing close analysis of the language; a social science professor whose students are reading mostly secondary sources might regard too many quotations as a sign of lazy writing. Students do not, generally, understand disciplinary differences unless these differences are taught, and the best people to teach them are instructors in the target disciplines.
Students tend to compartmentalize knowledge – they often have a hard time applying something they’ve learned in one course to a different course. Part of a college professor’s job is to break down those mental boxes and show the students how the different subjects they study fit together, but this is hard work, and it’s seldom done in a semester or two. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep fighting the good fight.
The students in my literature classes grump when I mark mechanical errors in their papers, so I hate to think what they say when science professors do it!
… Uh, yeah, I think I fail at having a thesis that makes a point 
I guess what I’m saying is that writing instruction across the curriculum = good, but immensely complicated. And please don’t blame the freshman comp instructors for all weaknesses in student writing – sometimes their goals are different, sometimes the students haven’t yet internalized what they learned in freshman English.
Lets not be leaving out the Humanities students, often their papers are just as bad. When I was in school our International Literature teacher had us get into separate groups by the book we chose and read each others essays on it. As I sat and read each essay, while intermittently glancing down at the Rubric, I wondered if anyone else in class actually understood the assignment. You can’t help someone who isn’t even close.
So, shouldn’t we have improved by now?
If I assign an essay in my math class, the students are expected to use paragraph structure, correct punctuation, and correct grammar. I also require them to spell all mathematical terms correctly. These items are included as part of the rubric for their grade. I’m a real hard-ass about it, but I’ve often surprised other teachers when they’ve told me that “Jane can’t write an essay to save her life”–and then I’ve been able to produce a quality essay from that student.
I teach 6th grade, if that matters to anyone. I also believe that this decision, along with many others, is made easier when I follow my class motto: What you allow, you encourage.
I don’t work with students, I edit co-workers’ material. Out of a team of 9, we have 3 that are very competent writers, two who write very well but need a grammar and punctuation clean-up crew to polish their work, and four that suck to varying degrees of suckitude.
But of the less-than-stellar copy writers, one is writing English as a third language and is learning fast and getting better and better. Another is leaving the company because it is so obvious that he lacks the skill to fulfill even the most basic writing requirements of his job here (his copy is utterly unusable and his boss has to rewrite it every time).
So since I’ve been working here (almost ten years) I’d say that at any given time, half of the people here whose jobs recquire copy writing are good at it. And when they are good they are usually really good and 20-25% need to be taken out back behind the shed and shot.
Note well: The job is not a “copy writing job” but is a job for which copy writing skills are required.