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shokwave comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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That "Engfish" essay is strange. It's right that textbooks and so on encourage students to write in a way that's impersonal and overly verbose. But it doesn't recognize the advantages of academic English. It doesn't even seem to recognize the role (or existence!) of dialects in general. Instead, it takes bad examples of academic English (the writing textbook) and suggests they should be more like bad examples of informal English (the third-grader).
If informal English and academic English are the two extremes on a normal distribution of writing styles, and exhortations to alter your writing style tend to have a smaller effect than their intensity should dictate (because writing styles are well-ingrained), this advice should push academic writers towards the middle of the distribution but not far enough to get into informal areas.
So... They're overshooting because it takes a lot of persuasion to get people to change their writing style just a little?
Jeez, why didn't you just say so?
As you have noted, I wrote it academically.