"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

[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