"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

[featherofeeling.livejournal.com]

Many of my university professors spent a long time disabusing us of the notion that using "I" is categorically forbidden, discussing the illusion of the neutral observer created by avoiding it, and mostly agreeing that discussing one's own positionality is necessary to the reader's understanding of the work. Then again, this mostly came up in presentations of sociological or other field research - especially in methods sections. Within the sociology major, I'd have answered "is necessary" to the second question, and in my other humanities subjects, "is often acceptable."