5.8 Voice
Erin Kelly; Sara Humphreys; Natalie Boldt; and Nancy Ami
One of the most common “rules” many university students learned in high school is that they shouldn’t use “I” in academic writing—or, at least, that they should ask permission to do so. To explain why this isn’t really a rule, we need to talk a bit about how the term “voice” gets used in literary studies and then in the context of grammar.
Literary studies has some specialized terms for talking about who seems to be the narrator (the implied speaker) in a text. If that narrator is a single person speaking as themselves—using I pronouns and limited to an individual’s perspective—we say the text is written using a first-person singular narrative voice. First person means that the voice of the speaker is as close as possible to the things being spoken about, and singular means there is only one speaker. (If we had more than one speaker relating a common point of view—using the pronoun we to reflect a collective experience—that would be first-person plural narration.) First-person narration differs from third-person narration, the tendency to write about experience in a more distanced way by using he, she, and they pronouns thus creating a sense that the speaker is separated from the experience being described.
It is a common convention for academic writing to use third-person voice and, in turn, avoid I pronouns—because it is generally the case that third-person voice is seen as more formal. It is definitely the case that third-person voice can create an impression of objectivity, that the implied speaker (the author) of the text is unbiased. And since the readers of academic writing are usually most interested in the information and ideas being presented, they might not find a first-person speaker’s personal experiences directly relevant to the purpose and context of the text. For example, if your readers mostly want to hear your ideas about campus security, you don’t need to write “I conducted a lot of research to determine what I think about possible campus security reforms”—you can simply tell your readers what you think about campus security reforms. All this is why some teachers simply say that students shouldn’t use I (first-person pronouns) in academic writing.
But note that first-person voice isn’t necessarily informal any more than third-person voice is necessarily formal. You can be flashy, formal, or ornate while writing about your personal experience, or really casual and colloquial while describing something from a distance. More importantly, sometimes personal experience is directly relevant to a subject being discussed. (See the academic article by Riley-Mukavetz for a good example.) If you are writing an academic essay about attempts by scientists to eradicate the facial tumor disease affecting Tasmanian devils, it probably doesn’t make sense for you to share your personal experiences and thus use first-person voice. But if, for instance, you have been skiing competi