``Another project of Labov's involved tabulating the percentage of grammatical sentences in tape-recordings of speech in a variety of social classes and social settings. ``Grammatical,'' for these purposes, means ``well-formed according to consistent rules in the dialect of the speakers.'' For example, if a speaker asked the question Where are you going?, the respondent would not be penalized for answering To the store, even though it is in some sense not a complete sentence. Such ellipses are obviously part of the grammar of conversational English; the alternative, I am going to the store, sounds stilted and is almost never used. ``Ungrammatical'' sentences, by this definition, include randomly broken-off sentence fragments, tongue-tied hemming and hawing, slips of the tongue, and other forms of word salad. The results of Labov's tabulation are enlightening. The great majority of sentences were grammatical, especially in casual speech, with higher percentages of grammatical sentences in working-class speech than in middle-class speech. The highest percentage of ungrammatical sentences was found in the proceedings of learned academic conferences.''Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct -- How the Mind Creates Language, discussing the work of linguist William Labov.
``Writers of books and articles should not use we in circumstances where the collective anonymity of the editorial of a newspaper is out of place. An author may, taking the reader with him, say we have seen how thus and thus ..., but ought not, meaning I, to say we believe thus and thus; nor is there any sound reason why, even though anonymous, he should say the present writer or your reviewer, expressions which betray his individuality no less and no more than the use of the singular pronoun. Modern writers are showing a disposition to be bolder than was formerly fashionable in the uses of I and me, and the practice deserves encouragement. It might well be imitated by the many scientific writers who, perhaps out of misplaced modesty, are given to describing their experiments in a perpetually passive voice, (such-and-such a thing was done), a trick that becomes wearisome by repetition, and makes the reader long for the author to break the monotony by saying boldly I did such-and-such a thing.''H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
``When the active voice and personal pronouns were reduced to a minimum or eliminated, much writing on science and technology became lifeless and dull. This led to the fallacy that writing on professional subjects has to be dull; therefore there is no use trying to do anything about it. Such writing is by its nature dull and heavy, the fallacy-maker insisted, and cited scholarly journals in proof. True, journals are often hard reading, even for scholars who have are used to them; and some articles come as close to being unreadable as anything published today with the exception of a few textbooks and many doctoral dissertations. The writers of turgid prose either do not know how to write better or, like the residents of Laputa, they scorn to cast light on the world and would rather cast a shadow. Some of them condescendingly assume that their readers are so stupid as to admire only what cannot be read and understood easily. But few readers are duped by unintelligibility. Even the greenest under-graduate views skeptically an incomprehensible professor: `Well, maybe he knows his subject, but you'd never guess it from the way he explains it.' ''H. J. Tichy, Effective Writing: For Engineers, Managers, Scientists