How to Avoid Using I In College Essay Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

If your essay responds to a prompt, you are well advised to use the words and ideas in the prompt frequently throughout the essay. This shows that you have thought carefully about the prompt, that you are addressing it directly, and that you did not plagiarize. If there is no prompt, give your essay unity by continuing to use words that express the thesis. Here are several words you should seldom use in academic essays, although they might be perfectly acceptable in certain contexts and in other kinds of essays: 1 totalizing words such as always, never, everyone, all, every, everywhere, totally, absolutely.

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These words are hard to defend, because your readers tend to be good at finding exceptions. 3 judgmental words such as stupid, dumb, awful, terrible, great, amazing. Some demeaning words such as dumb can almost always be specified better by using a less demeaning, more precise word.

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In some settings, calling an adult female a girl is appropriate, but in other settings it is inappropriate. Writers of academic essays are often taught to write in gender neutral terms whenever there is no reason to write about males or females in particular, and more and more readers are requiring that this norm be followed. 5 recognize that your words can have ideological meanings that please or anger your readers: the rise of the term democrat party in place of democratic party might tempt you to write democrat party in an essay about politics, but this trend has been limited mainly to political conservatives, so your use of the term will go over very differently with different readers. Whenever there is a genuine question about what is appropriate, choose the less controversial term. An academic essay about something else is not the place to fight an unrelated social or political battle, tempting as it may be.

The section five ways to turn off the reader under what makes a good essay? gives further advice. next section style tips previous section transitions: getting from point to point

how to cite kissel, adam. Cite this page best answer most teachers strongly discourage using i in papers at all! try to think of it from the perspective of everyone around you, rather than your own. Or something of the like, people will decide that your essay has a self centered point of view, rather than an objective one. I have had many great experiences with these loving animals, and i encourage everyone who likes animals to own one! dogs have been known to be great pets. They tend to be loving animals, and a great choice for animal lovers seeking companionship! i am a college student, and have to write quite a few papers, so i hope my advice helps! good luck: here2help 6 years ago this handout is about determining when to use first person pronouns i, we, me, us, my, and our and personal experience in academic writing.

First person and personal experience might sound like two ways of saying the same thing, but first person and personal experience can work in very different ways in your writing. You might choose to use i but not make any reference to your individual experiences in a particular paper. Or you might include a brief description of an experience that could help illustrate a point you’re making without ever using the word i. So whether or not you should use first person and personal experience are really two separate questions, both of which this handout addresses. It also offers some alternatives if you decide that either i or personal experience isn’t appropriate for your project. If you’ve decided that you do want to use one of them, this handout offers some ideas about how to do so effectively, because in many cases using one or the other might strengthen your writing.

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Often these are rather strict lists of absolutes, including rules both stated and unstated: each essay should have exactly five paragraphs. Often these ideas are derived from good advice but have been turned into unnecessarily strict rules in our minds. The problem is that overly strict rules about writing can prevent us, as writers, from being flexible enough to learn to adapt to the writing styles of different fields, ranging from the sciences to the humanities, and different kinds of writing projects, ranging from reviews to research. So when it suits your purpose as a scholar, you will probably need to break some of the old rules, particularly the rules that prohibit first person pronouns and personal experience.