CHAPTER 4

VOICE AND ECHO

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Think of an academic writer

whose work you particularly admire. Most likely you will choose
someone whose words convey passion and commitment, whose
writing engages you in a direct and visceral way; you feel as
though this person is chatting with you over a cup of coffee, per-
haps sketching diagrams on a napkin to illustrate a point, rather
than lecturing to you in a monotonous voice from a computer
printout or PowerPoint screen. Now think of an academic whose
writing you find hard to digest, even if his or her ideas are per-
fectly sound. In nine cases out of ten, I’ll wager, you will find the
following:

• The author writes in an impersonal voice (the pronouns I

and we might crop up occasionally, but could just as well
be absent).
• The author makes no attempt to engage in a direct conver-
sation with the reader (no humor, no asides, no engaging
anecdotes, no you).
• The author writes paragraphs in which nearly every
sentence either has an abstract noun as its subject (“this
study,” “the observation”) or, thanks to grammatical
sleight of hand, no named subject at all (“it can be seen,”
Copyright 2012. Harvard University Press.

“the patients were examined”).

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 36 STYLISH ACADEMIC WRITING

Once upon a time, PhD students across the disciplines were

taught that personality should never intrude upon scholarly writ-
ing. Apprentice scientists, social scientists, and even humanities
scholars were warned that their research would not be taken
seriously unless they reported on their work in a sort of human-
free zone where I and we dared not speak their names. Some
academics, forbidden to say I, resorted instead to the royal we
(“in this paper, we [the solo author] will argue”), the inclusive
we (“from these results, we [the author and readers] can sur-
mise”), or awkward, third-person constructions (“this writer has
argued elsewhere,” “the present researcher has found”). Some
took on a godlike persona, surveying the research landscape
from on high and delivering subjective pronouncements in
adverb-inflected language that cleverly disguised opinion as fact
(“cleverly disguised opinion as fact”). Some let their research
stand in as a kind of proxy for the absent I (“this paper will ar-
gue,” “this example demonstrates”). And some twisted their sen-
tences into passive verb constructions that hinted at but never
acknowledged personal agency (“it can be shown,” “the research
was performed”).
These days, first-person pronouns are allowed in most
academic disciplines: of the sixty-six peer-reviewed journals
in my cross-disciplinary study, I found only one—a prominent
history journal—that apparently forbids personal pronouns.
Nevertheless, as the following examples from my data set dem-
onstrate, academic writers still frequently employ the inclusive
or royal we:

In addition to questioning the class basis on which this long-accepted

distinction rests, we need to create new histories of feminism that
are no longer encumbered by problematic assumptions about women
and putative class interests or by socialist politics of the past.
[History]

They still couch their arguments in an impersonal yet authorita-

tive style that represents opinion as fact:

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 VOICE AND ECHO 37

Tax law is one of those areas that tends to be portrayed as discrete,

dry and somewhat dull. The ECJ’s recent direct tax jurisprudence
most definitely does not fit that bill. [Law]

They still refer to themselves and their research teams in the

third person:

The study investigators recruited the patients from March 2003

until April 2004 after a review of medical records and the comple-
tion of screening procedures to establish their eligibility for the trial.
[Medicine]

They still ascribe agency to the research rather than to the

researchers:

The concern of this article is language, and specifically the various

projects of linguistic “purification” that were part of literary mod-
ernism in Britain. [Literary Studies]

And they still delight in contorting their sentences into passive or

agentless constructions:

If, however, resemblance is identity, these features can be explained

simply by appealing to the properties of identity. [Philosophy]
Nondeterminacy is a fundamental notion of computing with many
important roles. [Computer Science]

Indeed, these last two phenomena—the “research as agent” sen-

tence and the “agentless” sentence—occur so frequently in aca-
demic writing that both constructions can often be found cohabi-
tating in a single paragraph:

Here it is demonstrated that the informativeness of a character can

be quantified over a historical time scale. This formulation may play
a role in resolving these controversies. [Evolutionary Biology]

If the authors of this article allowed themselves to speak as

themselves—“Here we attempt to resolve some of those controver-
sies by demonstrating”—their sentences would immediately be-
come more energetic, more persuasive, and easier to understand.

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 SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

N AT H AN I E L ME R MIN

Your question was: Does this qualify as “strikingly different” enough to

publish? I have never read anything like it, and I have read a lot on EPR
[Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels], though far from everything ever
written. . . . After reading the paper I put it aside and spent the next week
working hard on something totally unrelated. Every now and then I would
introspect to see if some way of looking at the argument had germinated
that reduced it to a triviality. None had. Last night I woke up at 3 a.m.,
fascinated and obsessed with it. Couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s my
definition of “striking.” So I say it’s strikingly different and I say publish it.

In 1992, physicist Nathaniel Mermin was asked to review a discovery

paper on “dense coding” for the journal Physical Review Letters. Al-
though his words were originally intended for a private audience of
one—namely, the journal’s editor—the personal, passionate quality of
Mermin’s referee report suffuses nearly all his academic writing, from
his titles to his chapter epigraphs:

• “The Amazing Many-colored Relativity Engine,” American Journal of Phys-

ics [article title]
• “Copenhagen Computation: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Bohr,” IBM Journal of Research and Development [article title]
• “These ‘bras’ and ‘kets’—they’re just vectors!”—Newly enlightened com-
puter scientist [chapter epigraph]

Mermin even manages to present mathematical formulas in a conversa-

tional mode tinged with humor:

• We begin with a silly formulation of ordinary non-quantum classical

computing.
• While the operation X defined in (4) makes perfect sense for Obits (repre-
senting the logical NOT), the operation Z makes no sense at all.

His chatty style will not appeal to every scientist. All the same, we can
see from these examples why Mermin, an expert communicator, has
succeeded not only as a groundbreaking scientist but as the author of
best-selling undergraduate textbooks and influential articles on the
teaching of physics.

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 VOICE AND ECHO 39

Social scientists often tell me that they have been trained to

avoid I and we, even though the APA Publication Manual, the
dominant style guide in the social sciences, has advocated the
use of personal pronouns since 1974: “We means two or more
authors or experimenters, including yourself. Use I when that is
what you mean.”1 “So why aren’t you allowed to write in the
first person?” I ask my social science colleagues. “Well,” they re-
ply, “it’s because we’re supposed to sound objective, like scien-
tists.” Yet most scientists have long since abandoned the imper-
sonal passive mode, a stance reflected in their most influential
style manuals: the ACS Style Guide explicitly recommends using
I or we when appropriate (“Use first person when it helps to keep
your meaning clear and to express a purpose or a decision”), and
the AMA Manual and the CSE Manual implicitly encourage first-
person pronouns.2 Thus we end up with the intriguing paradox
that the evolutionary biologists in my data sample, who write
mostly about plants and animals, use personal pronouns in every
one of the fifty articles I surveyed (100 percent), while the higher
education researchers, who write mostly about human beings, use
I or we only about half the time (54 percent; see Figure 2.1 in
Chapter 2).
An even more surprising anomaly occurs in the humanities,
where only 40 percent of the historians in my data sample employ
I or the personal we, in contrast to 92 percent of the philosophers
and 98 percent of the literary scholars. Historians who avoid per-
sonal pronouns often insist that they do so as a means of main-
taining an objective authorial stance. Yet of all the researchers in
the ten disciplines I surveyed, the historians were the most clearly
subjective—manipulative, even—in their use of language:
This is admittedly a vast geographical and institutional canvas, and
it is therefore necessary to focus on some issues to the exclusion of
others.
Fischer astutely responded that these polar approaches present
false choices.

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 40 STYLISH ACADEMIC WRITING

Atlantic history has matured to the point where it needs to break

out of the straitjacket imposed by the two models that have domi-
nated interpretations of the historiography of the Americas.

These three examples were published in the American Historical

Review, the only journal in my data sample that contains no
first-person pronouns (aside from the collective we) in any of
the articles I surveyed. The authors of these sentences never say
I; however, they do pack their prose full of subjectively weighted
nouns (canvas, choices, straitjacket), adjectives (vast, necessary,
polar, false, preset), adverbs (admittedly, astutely), and verbs
(focus, matured, needs to break out, imposed, dominated, force,
abandon) designed to sway readers to a particular point of view.
Compare the above sentences with the following extracts from
Isis, a history of science journal in which first-person pronouns
predominate:

A few years ago I was stumped for several days by this question:
Why is it that when we look in a mirror, left and right get reversed,
but up and down do not?
The scientific preeminence of the Paris museum in this period calls
to mind that elegant phrase, “the power of place,” that Janet Browne
has used as the subtitle of the second volume of her biography of
Charles Darwin. I think this is a wonderfully evocative phrase. With
apologies to Janet if something is lost in geographical translation, I
want to ask how the phrase could help us think about the Paris
museum.

Writing with a frankly personal voice—“I was stumped,” “I think

this is a wonderfully evocative phrase”—these authors present
themselves as fallible, emotive individuals. Their prose is not nec-
essarily more elegant, eloquent, or well argued than that of their
I-shunning colleagues. It is, however, more honest, making no
attempt to camouflage opinion as historical truth.
So which mode is preferable? As with most questions of
style, an author’s decision whether or not to use personal pro-
nouns remains very much a matter of personal taste. The “right”

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 SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

J OH N H E I L B R O N

Perhaps Bohr’s greatest strength was his ability to identify, and to exploit,
failures in theory. His exercise of this ability amounted to a method. He
would collect instances of failure, examine each minutely and retain
those that seemed to him to embody the same flaw. He then invented a
hypothesis to correct the flaw, keeping, however, the flawed theory to
cover not only parts of experience where neither it nor the new hypothe-
sis, with which it was in contradiction could account for phenomena. This
juggling made for creative ambiguity as well as for confusion: Pushing the
contradiction might disclose additional anomalies, and perhaps a better,
more inclusive hypothesis. . . . To work in this way one needs not only
creative genius, but also a strong stomach for ambiguity, uncertainty and
contradiction.

Historian of science John Heilbron writes in the “impersonal historical”

style favored by many historians, seldom if ever uttering the word I, yet
nonetheless conveying a strong sense of authorial presence and persuasive
power through his carefully selected verbs (exploit), nouns (genius), adjec-
tives (greatest), and adverbs (minutely). Subtly rather than overtly, he
nudges readers toward his own view—in this case, that the particular
scientific genius of physicist Niels Bohr resided in his ability to embrace
contradiction and failure.

Like all good science writers, Heilbron recognizes the importance of

couching abstract ideas (failure, theory, method, hypothesis, phenom-
ena, anomalies, ambiguity, uncertainty, contradiction) in concrete lan-
guage. He describes instances of failure as quasi-physical entities that
can be collected, examined, and retained like unusual rocks or rare bio-
logical specimens. Theories and hypotheses are juggled, contradictions
are pushed, and anomalies are disclosed. Bohr needed a strong stomach,
Heilbron tells us, to handle the kinds of “ambiguity, uncertainty and
contradiction” (he might just as well have written “laboratory experi-
ments involving maggots”) that make other scientists queasy.

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 42 STYLISH ACADEMIC WRITING

choice, then, is the one that the author has made consciously
and carried through with consistency and craft. Some academ-
ics employ I or we to establish a deliberately familiar, conversa-
tional tone:

Amid the silver jewelry as popular with foreigners as it is disdained

by Yemeni women, who now favor gold, I was amused to find a doll
that I immediately baptized “Chador Barbie.” [Anthropology]

Some writers—particularly in science and social science disciplines

where coauthored papers are the norm—take a more distanced
stance, writing active, pronoun-driven sentences but making no
attempt to build a direct connection with the reader:

We extracted DNA from 3 different sample materials: blood, liver, and

feces. . . . In addition, we used blood samples from 3 western gorillas
from the Leipzig Zoo (Germany) and also a liver sample from a sin-
gle deceased eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) from the Zoo
Antwerp (Belgium). [Evolutionary Biology]

Some authors, especially in the humanities, craft third-person prose

that is nonetheless imbued with subjectivity and character:

Settled by an extraordinarily literate people and long privileged

by the American history establishment, colonial New England’s
every square inch has been seriously scrutinized. Or so the conven-
tional wisdom has it. Consider this: Scholars have missed only
100,000 square miles, more or less, of terrain known intimately to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villagers—the coastal ocean
and its seafloor. The irony is superb, for the area seaward of the
shore was the first part of the northwest Atlantic reconnoitered by
Europeans. [History]

And some scholars write deliberately distanced, third-person

prose that contains neither personal pronouns nor any vestige of
a personal voice:

The present research evaluates whether psychache mediates the in-

fluence of perfectionism on suicidal manifestations. [Psychology]

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 VOICE AND ECHO 43

Each of these modes poses its own stylistic challenges. Academ-

ics who write highly subjective, first-person prose run the risk
of sounding unprofessional and self-indulgent to their peers.
Those who choose a mixed mode (personal pronouns with an
impersonal voice or third-person pronouns with a subjective
voice) must work through the potential inconsistencies of their
personal-yet-distanced stance. Finally, those who favor third-
person, impersonal prose need to ask themselves what they
are trying to achieve by suppressing personal agency, especially
given that so many of their academic colleagues, including re-
search scientists, now employ first-person pronouns. “I write that
way because I have to” turns out in most cases not to be a valid
reason.
Coincidentally, the percentage of articles in my five hundred–
article data sample that contain personal pronouns almost ex-
actly matches the percentage of advanced academic writing
guides in my one hundred–book sample that advocate personal
pronoun usage (78 percent and 79 percent, respectively; see Fig-
ures 2.1 and 3.1 in Chapters 2 and 3). Nearly all of the peer-
reviewed academic journals in my sample allow personal pro-
nouns; however, I also found examples in every discipline of
authors who avoid them and of writing guides that recommend
against them. These seemingly contradictory statistics offer a
message of empowerment and free will: pronoun usage is a mat-
ter of choice. Writers who feel uncomfortable using personal
pronouns can produce strictly third-person prose if they prefer
to, even in disciplines such as literature or philosophy, where
first-person pronouns predominate. Meanwhile, those who have
long avoided adopting a more personal voice out of habit, con-
vention, or fear—perhaps because they were told by a teacher or
supervisor long ago that personal pronouns sound “unprofes-
sional” or “unacademic”—can relax and give I or we a whirl.
For many academic writers, permission to use personal pro-
nouns comes as a tremendous relief. Referring to our actions in
the first person (“I think,” “we discovered”) comes naturally to

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 44 STYLISH ACADEMIC WRITING

most humans; suppressing our own agency, by contrast, requires

considerable syntactical effort and ingenuity. Most academics pub-
lish books and articles because we hope, on some level, to change
our readers’ minds: we want our colleagues to accept the validity
of our data; to affirm the usefulness of our methodologies; to
understand literary texts, historical events, philosophical prob-
lems, or legal issues in new ways. When we muzzle the personal
voice, we risk subverting our whole purpose as researchers,
which is to foster change by communicating new knowledge to
our intended audience in the most effective and persuasive way
possible.
Indeed, attention to audience is a hidden but essential ingredi-
ent of all stylish academic writing. One simple way to establish a
bond with readers is to employ the second-person pronoun you,
either directly or by means of imperative verbs, a mode particu-
larly favored by philosophers and mathematical scientists:

Look back at your parents’ decision to bring you into the world.
[Philosophy]
Consider a large retail chain with multiple stores and warehouses,
where products are ordered and shipped daily from the warehouses
to replenish the inventory in the stores. [Computer Science]

However, academics can find many other ways of striking a con-

versational note and keeping an ear cocked for replies. You might
visualize specific people looking over your shoulder as you
write—the eminent colleague, the taxi driver, the curious high
school student—and respond to their imagined questions. Peter
Elbow urges a more direct approach: “You must walk up to read-
ers and say, ‘Let’s go for a ride. You pedal, I’ll steer.’ ”3 Of course,
no writer can expect to connect with every reader every time
or to anticipate every possible response. All the same, the most
engaging writers are almost invariably those who pay the closest
attention to the real people—specialists and nonspecialists, col-
leagues and strangers—in whose ears their own words will echo.

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 SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

RU T H BE H A R

Throughout most of the 20th century, in scholarly fields ranging from lit-
erary criticism to anthropology to law, the reigning paradigms have called
for distance, objectivity, and abstraction. The worst sin has been to be “too
personal.” But if you’re an African-American legal scholar writing about
the history of contract law and you discover, as Patricia Williams recounts
in her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights . . . , the deed of sale of your
own great-great-grandmother to a white lawyer, that bitter knowledge cer-
tainly gives “the facts” another twist of urgency and poignancy. It under-
cuts the notion of a contract as an abstract, impersonal legal document,
challenging us to think about the universality of law and the pursuit of
justice for all.

In an eloquent plea for academic writing that dares to say I, anthropolo-

gist Ruth Behar dares to say you. Rather than narrating legal scholar
Patricia Williams’s story using the third-person pronoun she, Behar
puts us, squarely and perhaps uncomfortably, in Williams’s own place:
“If you’re an African-American legal scholar . . . and you discover. . . .”
Behar’s tone is at once conversational and confrontational: she wants
us on her side, but she also wants to rock the boat we’re sitting in.

A passionate advocate of impassioned scholarly prose, Behar turns

again to the second-person pronoun in her book The Vulnerable Ob-
server: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart:

When you write vulnerably, others respond vulnerably. . . . Call it senti-

mental, call it Victorian and nineteenth century, but I say that anthropol-
ogy that doesn’t break your heart just isn’t worth doing anymore.

Challenging ethnographic conventions that privilege objectivity over hu-

man feeling, Behar joins a long line of anthropologists who have turned
an incisive scholarly gaze on their own discipline. “To be able to write
skillfully in a personal voice takes training and practice,” Behar notes.
Her own work offers living proof that it can be done.

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 46 STYLISH ACADEMIC WRITING

THINGS TO TRY
• Choose a piece of your own writing and rate it according
to the following chart. Circle one item per column (A, B,
C, D):

A (Pronouns) B (Voice) C (Perspective) D (Register)

1. I or we Personal Subjective Informal

2. No I or we Impersonal Objective Formal

What happens if you change one or two of these variables?

For example, if you usually write in a third-person, imper-
sonal, objective, formal mode, introduce I or we and see
how you feel about the results.
• Play around with you. For instance, you could start your
opening paragraph with a direct exhortation to your
reader (“Picture the following scene”) or add a conversa-
tional aside (“You might wonder why”). Even if the
second-person pronoun sounds too informal for your
everyday writing, you can keep this trick up your sleeve
for occasions when you especially need to establish a
rapport with your audience, such as a conference presenta-
tion or a public lecture.
• Write down the names of at least five real people and
tape the list to your computer screen. The list should
include:
• A top expert in your field (someone whom you would
really like to impress)
• A close colleague in your discipline (someone who would
give you a fair and honest critique of your work)
• An academic colleague from outside your discipline
• An advanced undergraduate in your discipline
• A nonacademic friend, relative, or neighbor.

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 VOICE AND ECHO 47

Read your writing aloud and try to imagine each

person’s response to your words. Depending on discipline
and context, you might not necessarily aspire to write in
a way that all of these readers will understand all the
time. Nevertheless, it can be an interesting exercise to
think about how far each person is likely to get. For
example, will the advanced undergraduate make it past
the first paragraph of your article, your abstract, your
title?

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