Using “I” is generally discouraged in academic as well as news writing, though it is embraced in creative writing as well as on the opinion page. Courtney Prielipp | The Washtenaw Voice
Alice McGuire | Deputy Editor
Academic writing felt off limits until I was told to stop hiding myself.
When I was new to WCC many years ago, it felt important that I not ask questions for fear of anyone finding out how little I knew–a counterproductive attitude to hold in a learning environment. Having been homeschooled long before the pandemic normalized it, I felt everyone was an expert but me, and so I immersed myself in schoolwork and hoped I would someday have studied enough to be considered human.
I was relieved to find algebra came to me easily once I had the structure of a classroom as my life goals at that point consisted of learning to code so I could become a professional hermit. But I found myself distressed and staring at a blank Word document in the computer lab for hours on end every time I was given an essay assignment. I knew the mechanics of writing well enough, but my voice felt void. With my education up until that point having been wholly unaccredited and my social life being online in an age in which the internet wasn’t considered real, I felt no right to speak.
I felt like I lacked the credentials to be a person
This began to change when I took ENG 226. In addition to arming me with the tools to form an argument and back it up with sources, I was encouraged for the first and only time in my academic career to give writing a research paper in the first person perspective a try. Being given the opportunity to defend my thesis without the added psychological torment of obscuring my perspective was an experience that made me feel, for the first time, that I could write.
Tom Zimmerman, English faculty and writing center director, said that he thinks the use of “I” has become more acceptable in recent years as people have become less formal in general. “I tell my students that ‘I’ is okay if you appear in the essay.”
Josiah Jackson, professional faculty in the English department, expressed similar sentiments, adding, “I am very open to the idea that conventions change and shift. What I’m most interested in, though, is what effectively meets the goal of your piece of writing.”
My professor from that fateful summer, Michael Thompson, an adjunct English instructor, pointed out that almost everything that we have from Einstein and Stephen Hawking is written in the first person–a fact I feel like I learned when I took his class, though it had since slipped my mind.
“Not anything is purely objective. And I guess maybe that’s why there’s a push towards getting rid of it (‘I’). We want to be more objective. We want to be more unbiased. But, in the end, I don’t know if that’s entirely possible, and recognizing the fact that we’re not necessarily unbiased is the first step in allowing us to be more objective,” said Thompson.
I grew to love essay writing, but my growing expertise only made me more skeptical about writing in an objective style or putting expertise on a pedestal as I became ever more aware of the fact that experts are human as well as the fact that the humans in my life all had their own various expertises, whether they had the papers to prove it or not.
Experts can’t prove love exists
The scientific method and the birth of expertise have been a win for humanity in many regards–I’m relieved to not be getting a root canal done by someone who learned from YouTube tutorials just because they felt like having a law degree made them qualified for the job. But building society around it has meant that knowledge without credentials or experiences that cannot be measured and proven are often devalued or seen as lies.
Relying on evidence when inappropriate can also sow seeds of distrust
My early homeschool science education was informed by Bob Jones University Press textbooks, which were designed with a young-earth creationist telling of science in mind. As a child, I felt disturbed by the fact that, in spite of faith being defined in Hebrews 11:1 (New International Version) as “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” some felt a need to prove the existence of God.
I’ve since come to believe evidence is no more important than faith. Facts and data, while important, don’t seem to do as much to counter false assumptions as simply holding tight to the belief that everyone is intelligent and few go about their day with ill intentions.
What made me believe in evolution was not facts, but faith in the people who taught them.
