"I" in academic and scholarly writing

[rm]

This is not a search for advice. This is a point of curiosity to me, because my education was sort of extreme and obsessive on this point, and it occurs to me that perhaps other fifth-graders were not scarred for life by writing papers that said things like "this author feels that Disney World would be an idea summer vacation destination for her family."

So, inquiring minds and all that....

[Poll #1563413]

Comments

[jgcr.livejournal.com]

I don't think this was ever explicitly covered in my undergraduate or post-graduate education. In high school, I think it was, but I honestly don't remember.

Implicitly (post high-school), it seemed like there were two understandings:

In the humanities (my undergrad) you mostly didn't unless it was the kind of paper where you did -- though it's not like anyone drew a diagram as to which was which. There was a lot of critical theory stuff of various flavors running around, and some of them seemed to go well with an "I" approach.

For social science style papers (grad school), it was all stylized "In this paper I [or we] will show [blah] by doing [blah] and [blah]." No emotional connection, but strong emphasis on ownership of the research.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

Good point. I answered based on my humanities classes rather than science. There is definitely a difference in style, and I would be surprised not to see the "In this paper I will show..." construction in a scientific paper. (This changes somewhat by discipline and journal.)

[alienor.livejournal.com]

Ya, in engineering it was "this paper shows..."

[androgenie.livejournal.com]

My undergrad was in psychology, so it was heavy on ownership of behavior (I or We language). I'm in a masters program for Women and Gender Studies, and it greatly varies depending on how I'm looking at something (more science or social science based, or humanities based).