: Re: When is it acceptable to refer to an undefined group of people in academic writing? Within my students' college writing, I found much writing referring to essentially imaginary, or not well-defined

@Heady158

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I think the problem is not the broadness or the ambiguity in the identification of the group, but rather whether there is any evidence to back up the claim.

A statement like, "People have an average body temperature of 98.6 degrees" could be completely accurate even though it's very broad. A statement like, "Hispanics who live in Boston all like pineapples" is surely false despite being pretty specific.

That said, vague identification of a subject group can be a sign of weak thinking or even deliberate deception. I often hear people say things like, "The American people want the president to do X". At best this means "polls show that a majority want". Often I think what it means is "my friends and I want". I think lots of people fall into the trap of observing, "All the people that I hang out with at such-and-such a place agree that ..." and leap from there to "People agree that ..." Sometimes this should be obviously ridiculous, like just because all your friends at the National Coal Miners Association agree that coal is the energy source of the future surely tells us little about what the folks at the Green Energy Coalition think.

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