Writing advice in most books are like fingernails on chalkboards to me. A batch of te-rendered juicy bits from Williams, Strunk & White, & Zinsser. 1) They usually don’t acknowledge academic prose traditions and their evolution

2) They uncritically let American journalistic plain style dictate the norms. Plain style has a fascinating history, along with epistemological commitments, worth exploring before evangelizing them.

3) Their absolutism (“never use the passive voice”) to compensate for bad habit and poor training actually eradicates rhetorical subtlety.

4) oh, and the persistent deficit thinking. A linguistics perspective makes for better takes on why people do what they do

Schimel’s Writing Science and Kolln’s Rhetorical Grammar will be buried with me, like swords with a Viking. I wrap my fish with Strunk and White.

Also the two books by Harmon and Gross, showing the evolution of use of passives and nominalization across 3 centuries of scientific writing, and therefore the economic trends in which people are trained and incentivized.

Rather than fighting academese, consider that it’s a legit writing dialect that evolved in socioeconomic circumstances which are eroding. Then fight to bring rhet/comp and linguistic understandings to academic writing endeavors as a response to new circumstances.