"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

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

At this point, I can't remember what I was taught, only what I teach.

As other commenters have mentioned, the restriction goes by discipline. The same disciplines that restrict the first person also prefer the passive voice. The agent of an action may be less important than the action that was taken. As I've explained the issue in a handout for faculty:

Students who have been warned against the passive verb and encouraged to use first person in their English courses may founder in writing for their other courses because academic discourse in many of the sciences relies on these constructions to avoid overusing such constructions as “I applied this variable to the experiment”. So why do English professors discourage the passive, but other professors encourage it? The passive voice de-emphasizes the performer of the action. In narratives that students may write for their English classes, the performer of an action is perhaps the most significant element in the students’ texts. But for students writing a lab report, the performer of the action of the experiment is perhaps the least significant element, since the experiment is expected to proceed regardless of who performs it. The focus there is on the action and its object, not the researcher who performs it.