"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

[starstealingirl.livejournal.com]

To be fair, my background's in interdisciplinary humanities scholarship-- particularly feminist scholarship. People like the "I" in feminist scholarship-- the idea is that you should make clear who is conducting the scholarship, from what perspectives, and address your own limited perspective, because it makes room for a more egalitarian, collaborative approach to your scholarship. The use of the first person emphasizes that you're one person, with a specific physical and intellectual location, as opposed to passing off your perspective as that of some sort of disembodied voice of authority.

Then again, I'm sure that people in other disciplines would argue that us interdisciplinary humanities types are just a bunch of damn hippies who can't tell an academic paper apart from a blog entry.