Phd Thesis First Person Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

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This option may be re enabled by the project by placing a file with the name .htaccess with this line: summary: think about the habits and traditions in your field, think about the nature of your field and do not hesitate to take responsibility for your own possibly not that great ideas. now, let me elaborate more: the question encourages personal opinions for a good reason. Various sources on writing research papers differ vastly, though it seems majority does not favor the first person i form. Knuth's mathematical writing pg.4 although later on, the material also discusses the opposite pg.62 and 113. For the dissertation, i explained those rules very early on in the preface: i use i whenever the text speaks about my own decisions and choices i made and is the default voice. It means, that it's me who is to blame for whatever incorrect decisions exposed in the thesis. Only if i can show that there is an external force which would push anybody on my place to take the same route, i would use we to mean the research community, or humankind. I use we , whenever the discourse is explanatory, such as an exposition of a proof.

I also strictly use we , whenever i speak about an insight, or a result which was produced in a collaboration, such as developed in a joint research paper with somebody else. As a side effect, since this voice is not the default one, occurrence of such we always enforces a citation to the joint work, which is a good thing. My personal opinion also is that third person is very bad writing style, since it offloads responsibility for the presented results to some external entity. As if it wasn't me who made the stupid decision to push that other guy from the cliff, but the guy was somehow pushed from the cliff. In my opinion, we solves that problem only a little bit, because now the writer admits a bit of responsibility for the act, but still dilutes it by taking into the game somebody else either the reader, or the abstract research community.

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Saying i did this and that and by doing it i personally found this and that for me is fully taking responsibility for my results. In pure mathematics, one studies a problem and is not pushed into any arbitrary decisions e.g. Regarding experimental setup , so a style we the two of us, you, the reader, and me, the writer is more appropriate.

Ask anyone who has ever done one and they will tell you that there is a lot of me time during your years of research. It requires a lot of reading and writing, critical thinking, coming up with ideas, then throwing those ideas into the trash and coming up with new, and hopefully, better ones. This was one of the first things our programme director told us during our induction seminar: to be able to do a phd, you need to not only to be okay with being alone, you have to love it. You would imagine that with all this me time, all these academics living inside their brilliantly chaotic heads, having conversations with themselves not in a crazy kind of way … or maybe just a little bit , academia would be more open to the expression of ideas and thoughts in the first person. When i submitted my very first piece of writing towards my dissertation, i met with my supervisor to discuss the work i had done and he gave me some good feedback on making a plan, constructing a chapter using endnote. I did my ma in creative writing, where for a year we were told over and over again, that using the passive voice was not acceptable.

And after a year of strictly using the active voice and telling a story in the first person, removing all the 'we' and 'i' from my phd dissertation felt as though i was building a wall between myself and the reader. The reason for not using the first person, according to my supervisor, was that this wasn't fiction but academia – and there are no 'i's in academic writing. What's my issue with this aside from the irony ? well, it's easy to explain: by removing the first person point of view and the active voice from your writing, what you're actually doing is removing yourself.

This is a big problem since more than half of the academic writing that already exists is on subjects that are difficult to understand for most non academics. And when you remove the distinctive self or voice from your writing, it can become unbearable to read. When you alienate the 'i' from your dissertation, you are taking a big risk: turning your writing into a mere juxtaposition of facts and figures. There is already widespread debate about academia being reserved or exclusive, with academics writing only for other academics – and for good reason. Academia is supposed to be the place where knowledge is created a place where people come to make an original contribution to the existing literature.

But passive sentences – like that one i just wrote – risk stripping all the spice from your text. And you need spice: without it, reading feels like eating plain vegetables in a mexican restaurant. Some practices are so longstanding, like knocking on wood against evil, they have solidified in our subconscious – impossible to change, or even question. Academia is supposed to be a place to question everything, yet every day i'm surrounded by silent rules that are not up for questioning. And today, just for the sake of it, i dream of a world where i can use the dreaded 'i'. I imagine a world where i can own up to what i have created, the knowledge that i have contributed, not just on the cover of my dissertation, but throughout my writing by using the active voice – my voice – and the first person point of view. aslihan agaoglu is completing her phd in the department of middle eastern studies at king's college london – follow her on twitter @asli_agaoglu this content is brought to you by guardian professional .

To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the higher education network . natalie reid natalie reid amp associates great answer, fredric. But i need to add that mark twain was referring to single individuals, not two or more equal participants i.e. didier jambou centre hospitalier universitaire de nice dear colleagues, as said previously, it seems that the use of 'i' or 'we' depends on an implicit local convention, with no rules, and also depending on the cultures and langages. Ie in france, most of researchers, physicians used we even if they was alone to do a work. Finally, the response could depend on the context, and often, for phd students, the senior researchers ask the to write we. Not only to accustom them to ftheir uture carrier, but also to show them that without the entire lab help. Phd thesis first person plural students are searching: write my paper for me more than ever before.

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