"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

[ophymirage.livejournal.com]

As an English major, I didn't really have to write a lot of subjective papers; when writing analytical essays, one tends to use formal constructions where necessary.

As a folklorist grad student, 'I' is acceptable, as long as it's preceded by a lengthy post-modernist introduction in which one exposes one's awareness of all one's own possible (imperialist, first-world, racist, sexist, classist, insider/outsider, etc.) biases and apologizes for the acts of observation and drawing conclusions based on said flawed perspective. "I" is thus understood to stand in for the lengthy explanatory assumptive intro throughout the rest of the paper. :)