Someone on another website (reddit) was arguing that "から" should not be used
in written Japanese (which this person then clarified to mean formal, literary
written Japanese), and there are some websites that more or less seem to
advocate this view.

However, my feeling was that this can't possibly be true; while formal writing
will almost certainly not use "だから" to begin a sentence, it is easy to find
numerous of examples of "から" (meaning specifically "because", rather than
"from", etc.) used in formal writing in forms or contexts like "であるから",
"...があるから...", etc., and I doubt I could find a single book (or even article
of reasonable length) that doesn't use "から" at all.

Is it a commonly accepted view that "から" should never be used in formal
writing? Is this an example of hypercorrection by language mavens?
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2017-02-28T01:24:29.130
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question
word-choice
Use of "kara" in written Japanese
For dissertations and such, you pretty much have to use ので instead of から.  
I would tend to say it is the same for every written documents, but I am sure
there could be a few exceptions.

から Is mostly just for speaking.  
ので Is for polite speaking and for writing.

This is only for the meaning of "because" though.  
You can still use から for intervals (から～まで) and for any other "time" or
"location" related use like 「東京駅から出発する」or「食べてからいく」etc.
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As counterexamples prove, it's obviously oversimplification to affirm that から
is not cut out for formal writings.

For example, if you were to claim that "you don't get it because you want to,
but you get desirous of it because you see it" in some article, you would use
から and write 人は欲しいから手にするのではない。見るから欲しくなるのだ.

According to [this page](http://www.tomojuku.com/blog/karanode/), you can find
it say, at the bottom, 話し言葉。論文には使えない (colloquialism, not applicable to
articles), but at the same time, it says, just before that,
「～から」と「～ので」は、多くの場合、置き換えができます。 この比較は、絶対的なものではなく、こういう傾向がある、といった、大きなくくりです。("kara"
and "node" are in most cases interchangeable to each other. This comparison is
not absolute but a rough grouping that indicates tendency.), which is actually
the most important.
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answer