Personification is one of the recognized "figures of speech" that I was taught about back in high school English. Are you thinking that we should not use personification in or on general semantics? Should personification be eliminated in all non-finction writing? Who would police such a thing?

When you say "from time to time we should watch how we speak", this seems open to anything except never watching how we speak. Does this mean it's OK to not watch how we speak "much of the time"? "part of the time", "just occasionally"? Can this be objectively quantified in any way? What is "watching how we speak", anyway? Can we watch "bad" speech without doing anything about it?

Should we cite specific references, as in more formal academic writings, every time we are inclined to generalize, interpret, abstract from our experiences and readings, etc., "general semantics" - quote chapter and verse?

In the case of Science and Sanity, that is a specific reference, and I would prefer a page citation whenever a specific source is cited.