"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

[delchi.livejournal.com]

When I did professional technical writing, I was more focused on getting the tech bits right, and making them understandable. My work was then handed off to a cadre of editors who took care of such things for me. When it was edited, I would go back and make sure they did not twiddle the techie bits and then sign off on it. The idea was that we spent our time being technical & making inside jokes about people with flashing 12's on their VCRs & not obsessing on the current edition of the style manual, whereas our editing team spent their late nights reading up on the latest acceptable use of "I" and making inside jokes about people who misuse commas.

Some would call that poor education, and say that a well refined person would know both how to write technically , and correctly.
This used to disturb me until I discovered that the majority of people I dealt with who considered me unrefined were just mucking about trying to get more people to play their game.