"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

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Also, the "I", "we", "one" or what have you helps the writer (ha) delineate more precisely the tone, and where they are with their relationship to their audience.

"What I wish to suggest is that..." is different to "We can see from the following data that.." and "One finds that when performing the experiment..." is yet another beast, y'know?

[rm.livejournal.com]

This is one of those days when I feel like I went to school in the 19th century.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

But that's kind of awesome, isn't it? I love my 19th century education bits! It's all rigour and semi colons and oxford commas. And you know my aca-prose is a strange melange of pop-culture references and long involved half-page long Jamesian sentences & Victorian constructions, and I'm doing all right.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Do you know how many paragraph-long sentence I've written today? Just in the course of my life.

I so rarely try to be current or modern in any way. I tend to find all these little things passing out of the world to be worth preserving. So I'm having a sort of BuffyBot inner-conflict short-circuit on this fucking paper.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

So keep it then! They're all ultimately stylistic choices. Prose is a matter of fashion, and you can be as retro as you want to be. If you want to reference your own accounts, you could just offset them as if you were quoting from an interview with yourself or something of that nature.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I have no idea what I'm doing right now, more or less. Did you see my TOTAL FREAK OUT post? On the other hand, I did just find a great paper about Sherlock Holmes that addresses the phenomenon of people who thought/think he was a non-fictional dude vs. the people who know he's fictional and prefer to treat him as if he's not.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I saw. *pets* You're going to be fine, you know. You just need to relax. It's really not different from the other stuff you do, you've just got it built up in your head.

Email me the cite for that! It sounds awesome & useful for my diss.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Just did. It has diagrams!

[bare-bear.livejournal.com]

See, when I see the different wordings here, I immediately come up with "the following data indicates...".

With the occasional exception of methodology and possibly future work, I rarely see 'I' or 'we' in published journal articles. In the sciences, or at least, in the geological, geophysical, and geochemical journals I've read, the author is completely removed from the text and only the science and data is presented. In fact, I usually get jarred out of the writing when I come across authors who puts themselves into the paper, since it's just not expected.

But I'll admit, my experience with this is pretty...narrowly focused. :)

[bare-bear.livejournal.com]

Uh...sorry to just butt in, btw. :D I'm in the middle of re-writing crappy bits of writing for my thesis; I saw the way your worded that and went "IT SHOULD BE LIKE THIS!!". lol