The ‘confessional appendix’ has become quite fashionable in studies of imperialism. Both David Cannadine and Niall Ferguson’s books on empire include first-person essays in which they recount their family relationship to the subject. To be honest, charming though they can be, I’m not sure that they really add anything much to the analysis.

Jack:

Getting a paper out now is like money in the bank, I reckon. You can always catch up on the thesis-writing later!

I don’t think I’d be much use in a course on performance and history, but I used to hang around with student theatre types, so I guess I picked up a few things here and there …

Jonathan:

I don’t have a problem with the pronoun per se, but that’s a weak introduction, which I’m sure you’ll fix along the way.

Well, that would fit with the rest of the writing I did last week, it was all pretty dire! Hopefully this week’s will be better.

Chris L:

Orwell was right — eschew obfuscation! But didn’t he himself use the first-person all the time in his essays? Of course, he wasn’t writing for academics.

Gavin:

I know what you mean — blogging is very cathartic in that way, you have license to be egotistical (though sometimes I get embarrassed by the number of times I say ‘I’ in a post!) It’s almost mandatory to write in the first person, not just permissible, in fact.

Being empirically-inclined myself, I have little problem with the idea that evidence+methods overrides motive (and while its the motives of Holocaust deniers which make them despicable, it’s their abuse of evidence which makes them plain wrong). But I think the mea culpa has its place. I’ve mentioned to Dan at Trench Fever before that I thought Mark Connelly’s explanation (in We Can Take It!) of his own relationship, since childhood, to the pleasure culture of WWII. It made me think about my own reasons for studying what I do. Whether that’s actually useful to know (as opposed to just being interesting), I don’t know!

Having said that, I’m just reading Myth and Memory (I’m poor: I had to wait for the paperback!) and I think the use of “we” works really well in that context because it’s all about ideas that are pretty much universal in British culture.

I don’t remember using “we” at all in my thesis (I’m considering some stylistic analysis to make sure, as it might also make an interesting blog post), but where I use it on my blog it’s usually to refer to things that I consider to be universal, but mostly in negative terms: things that nobody knows; things we think we know that might turn out to be wrong; things that might be beyond human understanding.

(Jack: my former supervisor says not to worry as journals often do take an age. Also the journal in question has changed publishers so might be undergoing traumatic upheavals.)

I sympathize with the intention here, but the first person plural often seems downright presumptuous to me in such situations. As Tonto says: “Who’s this ‘we’, kemosabe?”

But, ‘I think this for these reasons, and here’s evidence that backs this up’, on the other hand, is a justifiable form of words in my opinion - even in a thesis. This might have something to do with the fact that my university explicitly advises students (well, arts students anyway) not to eschew ‘I’. It’s like a 70s social democracy thang, I reckon.

I don’t have a problem with the pronoun per se, but that’s a weak introduction, which I’m sure you’ll fix along the way.