"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

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

In short, in high school we were taught that using first person in academic writing was a big no-no. I don't recall its ever being addressed in any of my college English classes, because they were primarily literature-based as opposed to language-based, however in some history electives that I took, "I" was all over the place. Since history used Turabian style, with which I was completely unfamiliar, and I was used to using MLA, MLA always wins out for me. To be honest it still kind of makes me cringe or annoyed when I see it, but eh, that's just me.