I always thought that the use of "I" was a no no in academic writing, so I avoided using it. But now I started writing the actual thesis, I get so confused with the advice I get from books and journal articles with regards to referring to oneself. For example this one:

"If you do decide to avoid the use of 'I' at all, don't substitute 'we' and don't move into pompous circumlocutions such as 'the author'"

What do you think? How do you handle this problem? If using "the author" is pompous, and if we are not supposed to use "passive voice" then how do we refer to ourselves in the thesis?

I've used "it was decided..." "it was discovered", and not mentioned whi by (since I was the authour I would hope people reading would understand that I did the deciding, discovering etc. But this was in a paper, not a thesis.

Personally I hate the use of "one"; reminds me of those Daily Mail readers with plummy voices moaning about immigration or lack of parking

Oops; not that I was implying that you were like that...just that some formal writing has the use of "one" and it doesn't seem right to me. I don't think that "the author" is pompous, on the other hand; I'd be happy to use that.

I agree juno. Maybe it is ok to read the use of "one" once in the whole text, but I hate it when people overuse it. On the other hand, I was criticised by the research committee for using "it was decided..." etc on my proposal. I'm so confused.

lol juno . I didn't think you did. I couldn't think of any other way to describe what I mean, so I used the "oneself".

Why didn't they like "it was decided"?

I haven't got to thesis-writing stage yet; are the rules on this very strict?

I've always gone down the passive voice route because I've been unsure on this matter as well. I've not heard anything against it so far - is it perhaps a matter of which field "one" is in?

Mind you, reading recent texts I've seen "I" a couple of times, or if it is written by more than one author "me".

Bit of a puzzle really.

Sorry, not "me", but "we" LOL!

just in case anyone would be interested to read, I've just found this article on Science Direct (I haven't read it yet, as I was just trying the keywords of "personal pronoun writing")

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0889-4906(99)00009-5

oops! that link killed the thread. I wonder why it didn't text-wrap.

PostgradForum Team heeeeelp!

I was and still am very reluctant to use "I" but I think that is getting more and more frequent in academic writing - at least in the humanities, or at least in some areas.

I downloaded a thesis of a recent Dr yesterday. Now I opened it to see the language and voice the author used. Find command in the pdf brought 1119 uses of "I" as a single word. He wrote the whole thesis referring to himself.

Slightly off-topic, but where can I download a PhD thesis? I always thought one can only make an inter-library loan with the British Library?

personally I use "I" and I do it for specific reasons. I believe the avoidance of referring to oneself is a discursive tactic that helps a text appear objectiv and academic. But since I do not subscribe to the conceptions of objectivity that underlies this tactic I have no need to use it - I rather believe in the situatedness and context-specificity of knowledge and thus it would be a grave mistake to make dissapear the author - myself - by not referring to me and other discursive tactics that serve to place the author/observer outside of/far distant to the object he/she is observing/writing about.

Otto, I usually get them from University websites. So you can run a search on google with phd theses (or thesis) archive keywords and select only the ac.uk sites (avoid the commercial cr*p). Your library will have hundreds of them in their archive but they wouldn't be the digital versions. I'd also keep an eye on recent PhDs'academic websites.