"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

[ravenskye8.livejournal.com]

This was covered obsessively by my teachers in high school... Every writing assignment that wasn't creative writing, or otherwise meant to be something from a first person perspective had to be written without any references to self or others. It wasn't even acceptable to use the sample sentence you have above - I'd have to find some way to neutrally express that the arguments listed in the paper naturally lead to the conclusion that Disney World is an ideal vacation destination.

I found it so surprising when I got to college that no one seemed to care about such things unless I was writing a lab report for one of my science classes...

And argh - I hated always having to tell autocorrect to suck it up - yes, dammit, I want to write in passive form!