"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

[pennswoods.livejournal.com]

I my applied social science field, the degree to which authors use "I" in their academic articles is often related to their methodologies and epistemological stance.

Those conducting ethnographic research in which the researcher is a participant observer must articulate their role and positionality in the study, which necessitates the use of "I". On the other hand, among those who do more post-positivist influenced quasi-experimental research, "I" tends be used less frequently (e.g. 'In this paper, I will show...') or replaced with passive or third person constructions such as "the authors".

In my past experience as an undergraduate writing instructor, the issue of whether and when to use "I" in academic writing would often come up. Since this varies across disciplines and genres within academic writing, we would compile corpus of writing in these areas and use a concordancer to search for the presence and function of the word "I" as a guide.