Use of "kara" in written Japanese


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?




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.

