@bibliolater @linguistics @ai We have long been pushed this way in the name of "scholarly" tone, especially in the social sciences. The whole APA manual was developed expressly to purge scholarly writing of individual bias, and there's no shortage of reviewers and reviewers out there who demand crabbed verbiage on the grounds that it is "formal" and "academic". Or who forbid passive voice. How many of them are actually rhetors? They simply don't know – what they exercise is mere prejudice.