First-Person Voice

Writing in the first-person voice involves using the first-person pronoun (I, we, me, us, my, our) to represent your ideas. In some disciplines, the first-person is commonplace; in others, third-person voice is expected, and therefore demanded by dissertation committees, journal editors, and researchers themselves. Authors who avoid using the first-person pronoun in academic writing seem to believe that it interferes with the impression of objectivity and impersonality they seek to create. However, in many reports of qualitative research, scholars prefer to use the first-person in their writing, as this matches the intention of giving voice to their participants' pers-pectives. Indeed, style guides published by specific associations provide guidance on this issue. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition, for example, states, “When referring to the author(s), use the first person, not the [Page 352]third person. That is, say ‘I injected the subjects with the appropriate dose of Athenopram,’ not ‘the experimenter injected …’” (p. 37). Related to this, the manual advises authors to use the active rather than the passive voice; that is, to write “we injected …” rather than “the subjects were injected with …” (p. 41).

Although the American Psychological Association did not explicitly encourage use of the first person until 2001, other academic associations have long urged its use where appropriate. For example, in 1979 the American National Standard for the Preparation of Scientific Papers for Written or Oral Presentation, which represents the views of many scientific organizations, recommends that when a verb concerns action by the author, the first person should be used, especially in matters of experimental design. However, it also warns against excessive use of the first person, principally for reasons of stylistic felicity. For example, if a first-person pronoun is repeatedly the first word and/or subject of sentences, then it quickly becomes monotonous.

As long ago as 1966, Henrietta Tichy wrote (in the first edition of Effective Writing for Engineers, Mana-gers, Scientists) that arbitrarily avoiding necessary and common words such as I and we leads to awkward writing marked by over reliance on the passive voice and other weak indirect speech. Writers who discard these words turn to evasive and pompous substitutes such as the author, one, the researcher, or the present writer. Perhaps more important, indirect and passive constructions allow authors to evade responsibility for what they write.

Novelist and critic Ursula Le Guin points out that writers often use the third person and the passive voice because these forms are indirect, polite, and unaggressive; they make thoughts seem as if nobody had personally thought them and actions seem as if nobody had actually done them so that nobody need take responsibility. Thus, she notes, these constructions are popular among “bureaucrats and timid academics” (Le Guin, 1998, p. 68) and generally avoided by writers who are prepared to take responsibility for their interpretations and assertions.