Why Your English Teacher Told You Not to Use First-Person and Why That Teacher Was Wrong
I occasionally get students who believe they should never use first-person in an essay, especially a research essay. Once upon a time, one of their teachers forbade the use of first-person, and the students took it to heart.
Since "no first-person" inevitably results in bad writing (an overabundance of passive voice; the use of "one" or "student" instead of "I"), I always tell my students, "You may use first-person in my class. In other classes, check with the instructor."
I never thought much about WHY teachers were telling students this. I vaguely remember someone telling me not to use first-person, and I vaguely remember ignoring that someone; other than that, it didn't seem like an important issue.
However, I recently discovered at least one reason teachers ban first-person: prevented from using first-person, students will set aside me-centered thinking and use credible evidence; that is, rather than saying, "I think this, thus it is true," students will write, "According to expert X . . ."
I don't buy this argument; in fact, I think banning first-person usage ends up doing more damage than good. If the problem is the lack of expert/credible sources in students' writing, not using first-person doesn't solve the problem; it just covers it up. After all, a first-person's account could be more credible than an "expert's" account. I'd much rather read a student's personal/eyewitness account of 9/11 than a thousand third-person conspiracy theories.
Associating first-person with subjectivity and therefore, with poor evidence also leads to a logical fallacy:
Since when?
There's a lot of ridiculous non-first-person evidence out there which has no more credibility than a teenage driver claiming, "I never speed." A claim, introduced with an "I" or not, is still a claim, and any claim is disputable (as is all evidence).
I've seen the results of this logical fallacy in my students' writing; they confuse claims with support, thinking any statement without "I" is evidence (there's a huge difference between arguing, "Cats make great pets" and proving that cats make great pets). They also confuse claims with facts, thinking any statement without "I" is a fact: The United States is having a recession. Newsweek says so. I can use this in my paper!
All evidence/claims are testable, both personal evidence ("I experienced") and non-personal evidence. Determining credible evidence has nothing to do with first-person and everything to do with the credibility of the speaker/researcher/study/source.
In a well-intention desire to prevent excessive grandstanding, teachers who ban first-person are confusing cause with effect. A superfluity of "I think that . . ." "I believe that . . ." "I must be right because . . ." may be the result of a me-centered culture (and can get annoying), but it has little to nothing to do with whether the speaker can actually be trusted or whether the speaker's evidence is meritorious. I often tell my students, "Personal evidence is the strongest evidence you have; it just isn't enough except to your parents and your friends." But to say that personal evidence carries no weight at all is such an obvious untruth that students are liable to follow the teacher's instructions while missing the point. The result is terrible critical thinkers and even worse skeptics (exchanging one mass of information--my own--for someone else's mass of information doesn't lend itself to objective reasoning).
By excising personal experience as credible evidence, students will not only not learn about evidence, they will also (bizarrely enough) learn that rules of evidence don't apply to them. Personal evidence can be judged against a rubric as much as any kind of evidence; by divorcing personal evidence from the quest for credibility, the students' "me-centeredness" has been enforced. Hence my master's program--where a fellow student told me that all literature before 1970 is worthless because it's patriarchal, that the student's own warm and fuzzy feelings were of more objective worth than said texts, and that, furthermore, some political theoretician agreed with the student, all without the introduction of "I". Not that "I" would make it better; stupidity is still stupidity.
I don't think "me-centered" arguments in the college environment will go away until* students are forced to be intelligent (but not cynical) about information. We live in a media-saturated culture. This is good! Dismissing the not-so-great parts of that media saturation (Facebook, blogs--hee hee--the focus on the self) doesn't help anybody. Helping students recognize and assess it might.
*I don't think they will ever go away actually--college students have been "all about me" since Parisian college students in the 1300s used form letters to write home for money. Really. I'm not making that up.
Since "no first-person" inevitably results in bad writing (an overabundance of passive voice; the use of "one" or "student" instead of "I"), I always tell my students, "You may use first-person in my class. In other classes, check with the instructor."
I never thought much about WHY teachers were telling students this. I vaguely remember someone telling me not to use first-person, and I vaguely remember ignoring that someone; other than that, it didn't seem like an important issue.
However, I recently discovered at least one reason teachers ban first-person: prevented from using first-person, students will set aside me-centered thinking and use credible evidence; that is, rather than saying, "I think this, thus it is true," students will write, "According to expert X . . ."
I don't buy this argument; in fact, I think banning first-person usage ends up doing more damage than good. If the problem is the lack of expert/credible sources in students' writing, not using first-person doesn't solve the problem; it just covers it up. After all, a first-person's account could be more credible than an "expert's" account. I'd much rather read a student's personal/eyewitness account of 9/11 than a thousand third-person conspiracy theories.
Associating first-person with subjectivity and therefore, with poor evidence also leads to a logical fallacy:
Since first-person produces less credible/more subjective/more me-centered evidence, then non-first-person must produce more credible/more objective/less me-centered evidence.Oh, yeah.
Since when?
There's a lot of ridiculous non-first-person evidence out there which has no more credibility than a teenage driver claiming, "I never speed." A claim, introduced with an "I" or not, is still a claim, and any claim is disputable (as is all evidence).
I've seen the results of this logical fallacy in my students' writing; they confuse claims with support, thinking any statement without "I" is evidence (there's a huge difference between arguing, "Cats make great pets" and proving that cats make great pets). They also confuse claims with facts, thinking any statement without "I" is a fact: The United States is having a recession. Newsweek says so. I can use this in my paper!
All evidence/claims are testable, both personal evidence ("I experienced") and non-personal evidence. Determining credible evidence has nothing to do with first-person and everything to do with the credibility of the speaker/researcher/study/source.
In a well-intention desire to prevent excessive grandstanding, teachers who ban first-person are confusing cause with effect. A superfluity of "I think that . . ." "I believe that . . ." "I must be right because . . ." may be the result of a me-centered culture (and can get annoying), but it has little to nothing to do with whether the speaker can actually be trusted or whether the speaker's evidence is meritorious. I often tell my students, "Personal evidence is the strongest evidence you have; it just isn't enough except to your parents and your friends." But to say that personal evidence carries no weight at all is such an obvious untruth that students are liable to follow the teacher's instructions while missing the point. The result is terrible critical thinkers and even worse skeptics (exchanging one mass of information--my own--for someone else's mass of information doesn't lend itself to objective reasoning).
By excising personal experience as credible evidence, students will not only not learn about evidence, they will also (bizarrely enough) learn that rules of evidence don't apply to them. Personal evidence can be judged against a rubric as much as any kind of evidence; by divorcing personal evidence from the quest for credibility, the students' "me-centeredness" has been enforced. Hence my master's program--where a fellow student told me that all literature before 1970 is worthless because it's patriarchal, that the student's own warm and fuzzy feelings were of more objective worth than said texts, and that, furthermore, some political theoretician agreed with the student, all without the introduction of "I". Not that "I" would make it better; stupidity is still stupidity.
I don't think "me-centered" arguments in the college environment will go away until* students are forced to be intelligent (but not cynical) about information. We live in a media-saturated culture. This is good! Dismissing the not-so-great parts of that media saturation (Facebook, blogs--hee hee--the focus on the self) doesn't help anybody. Helping students recognize and assess it might.
*I don't think they will ever go away actually--college students have been "all about me" since Parisian college students in the 1300s used form letters to write home for money. Really. I'm not making that up.
posted by Kate Woodbury at 16:06
2 Comments:
As they said in the Old Days, there is a time to "I" and a time to refrain from "I".
I can't think of a great work of literature written in the first person. OK, Charles Dickens ("Chapter One: I am born". Walt Whitman - but that was nutty old Walt.
I think the thing to do is apply the rule "learn the rules before you break them".
Would you say that there's a difference between fiction and non-fiction as far as 1st-person writing goes?
That "no 1st-person" rule may be as arbitrary as the "the infinitive is not to be split" rule. (But at least there's a solid background to that one.)
You could do some serious mind-warping by assigning an essay "What I did on my summer vacation", "and don't use the 1st person".
"... all literature before 1970 is worthless because it's patriarchal,..."
Aha - the mind-numbing fog of postmodernism.
I've been trying all day to think of a classic that uses "I," and I got one: Moby Dick! Although the first line "Call me Ishmael" is really just a brief introduction to an omniscient eye which sounds more third-person than anything else.
It has become more and more common to see first-person in research--for the researcher to "show" his or her hand. I quite like this approach because I'm a big fan of "transparency," knowing the bias (or what I like to call the "invested interest") of the researcher. It does create a more memoir-type tone.
I have to admit, I encourage my first-year composition students to use first-person in this way because I find their reflections more interesting than their research; unfortunately, their research often (but not always) resembles my fourth-grade paper about an explorer: a regurgitation of facts rather than a marshalling of evidence.
Speaking of post-modernism, when writing my thesis, I found a great quote by Camille Paglia which I used in a footnote: "[A] result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to 'read' anymore--and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students. Cultural studies, for example, despite its auspicious name, has been undone by its programmatic Marxism and is a morass of misreadings or overreadings . . . I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly 'exposed' by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no 'death of the author' (that Parisian cliché) in my worldview . . . The modernist doctrine of the work's self-reflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry."
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