As a young grad student I had an extremely overblown writing style that it took several semesters to lose. Reading this I think I realize why. It's because we young grad students spend the first couple of semesters reading only the great papers of the last few decades. But the great papers were written by great people. Knuth was at the top of his field for at least a decade when he wrote this, so the reviewers wouldn't give two hoots that it contained the word "I" so many many times, or that he consumes paragraphs where a sentence might seem to do (and no it doesn't). Or consider Dijkstra's famous goto paper; some editor just said, "Oh Dijkstra, we don't need this reviewed, let's just call it a letter to the editor."