When writing a formal, analytical essay, a student's academic voice needs to shine through. A main voice problem in student academic writing is that students use personal pronouns.
Academic writing requires essays to be written in third person, so the second person voice of you cannot be used. When reading you, readers replace their name for that word, which often confuses the sentence.
Academic writing also avoids first person pronouns like I or we. Writers should simply make statements directly instead of writing "I believe."
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I'm doing a project for corpus linguistics and I want to know where you got this rule for not using "we." I pulled 94 random articles from professional writers in the field of language and literature and "we" is ranked as the 40th most common word among them.
ReplyDeleteI'm just looking for reference books that make a point of this "no personal pronouns" business.