A World without People Using the Personal Pronoun to Improve Technical Writing

We shall never improve the general quality of technical and scientific writing until it is liberated from the unwritten rule that prohibits the use of personal pronouns. This superstition made possible-if not inevitable-the development of the "technical style" of writing, the most unreadable and unnatural prose in the literature of the English-speaking world. Many of our problems in technical writing-verbosity, obscurity, pomposity, awkwardness, and a dozen other ills-could be relieved or eliminated if writers would accept the idea that personal pronouns are as much a natural part of communicating ideas on paper as they are in talking. Will that day ever come?