"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

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

This has always struck me as a question about quality of prose, and about the writer's confidence in her command of formal language.

If there's some rule in American academia saying that you shouldn't use "I" in academic or scholarly writing, I'd suspect it grows out of a formalization of observed practice, and that the observed practice in turn grew out of writers' anxieties about their own writing. If you look at J.R.R. Tolkien's academic work, or the opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes, you'll see that they use "I" where it's warranted -- and you'll also see that neither one has any reason to doubt his ability to write in language that's both formal enough for the highest occasion and flexible enough for everyday use.

This is a case where both the confidence and the substantive reason to be confident are relevant, I think: this kind of formal speech only works (in the sense of conveying authority as well as information/argument) when the reader perceives it as natural and unforced, when it neither talks down to the reader nor has anything of ingratiating faux-populism to it. So it requires that the writer be comfortable with it; discomfort will show. At the same time, though, a writer doing this had better have the skill to handle the language well, and the substantive content needs to match the degree of confidence expressed in it; otherwise the authorial voice will seem not confident but arrogant, and unpleasantly so.

Done well, this kind of formal writing makes all other forms look pathetic and inadequate. But I do understand why not all academic writers attempt it: proscriptions by earlier teachers aside, it's something of a high-wire act. If you try it and fail, well, it's a long, long way to the ground.

[rm.livejournal.com]

As much as this was both not a plea for advice, and you've been relatively insulted from my narratives about the process of writing this paper for the Bristol conference, you can, no doubt, clearly see what I'm running up against, and the way it is complicated less by my lack of academic expertise and more by my possession of other types of relevant authority which are central to the paper, perhaps, in part, because my anxiety about their presence in my work illustrates the point I'm trying to make about fannish proprietariness over characters through mourning ritual being so intensely transgressive both within the community and outside of it.

Okay, that sentence above proves I've been staring at this shit waaaaaaaaaaaay too long.

Or Is It The Subject?

[keith418.livejournal.com]

I suspect this issue comes up in part because we seen a turn to the subjective as a whole. The issue is avoided if you never write anything that requires a personal reference. But if we are encouraged to write about topics in which that kind of perspective is likely to be determining, then...

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

It never occurred to me that it was a plea for advice, as you'll already know from the way I went all theoretical on you. But now that you've clued me in a bit as to context, I'm going to offer utterly unsolicited quasi-advice anyway out of fellow-feeling. I haven't ever had to deal with your precise set of issues, but I'm all too familiar with analogous situations.

So, would it help at all to write the thing out in a completely different format? Say, as a locked/private post, or as a prolonged reply to a comment? I mention this only because my own subconscious, for God only knows what reason, sometimes seems to accept discussion-in-comments as being a place where complex ideas can be expressed in relaxed-yet-confident terms, even as I'm finding it impossible to do a top-level post that makes exactly the same damned points. If it does work, you'l wind up with something you'll still need to revise; but you could also find that the very points you're having the worst time with now have turned into sections you can cut and paste as written.

It shouldn't work, and I don't know why it ever does. And yet.

And this is where my envy of Holmes comes raging to life, in the way of a giant fire that's been banked but never quite put out. How lovely it must be, to be able to write something like the celebrated Lochner dissent without fretting endlessly, and without having to trick yourself into it even when you knew it was going to be read by all the nation!

[rm.livejournal.com]

I, in fact, had a total, very quiet, freakout two days ago, wherein I decided I reason perfectly well on LJ and instead of being all "I am writing a paper" I should take exactly the approach you describe in order to come up with a draft. Not how I normally do things, but may well be the only solution to my current set of crazy.