Comments on: The academic ‘we’

By: Boris

Boris — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:04:50 +0000

I was taught to treat data as plural and it would be hard to change.

By: Boris

Boris — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:03:09 +0000

I entirely agree with AN#9 but also with AL#AN10. I alluded to the the Atlantic divide in my comment #1.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:42:10 +0000

Rajat - And I think they are often right to do so. I think it is silly to import Latin grammar into English, and people don’t do so with similar words. How many people would say ‘The agenda say that the next item is…’? The ever-sensible Pam Peters advises using the English distinction beween mass nouns and count nouns. Count nouns, as the name suggests, refer to things that can be counted. ‘Persons’, ‘blogs’ etc. They take the plural. Mass nouns refer to concepts with less clear boundaries, ‘information’, ‘mud’. They take the singular.

‘Data’ can be either, depending on context. For example, if I said ‘Andrew Leigh uses a lot of data in his research. This data is interesting.’ The singular is correct in this case, because I am referring to an undifferentiated collection of data sets. If I was referring to particular set of data it would be a count noun and take a plural verb.

However, in spoken English ‘data’ is mostly singular.

By: Rajat Sood

Rajat Sood — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:26:28 +0000

Off-topic, but I find that even some academics refer to ‘data’ in the singular, such as, “the data shows…”. Of course, this is a lot more common outside academe.

By: parkos

parkos — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:02:19 +0000

Over in Korea, which is probably the most erudite culture in the world, having produced the first printed books (not Guttenberg), and where parents spend up to 50% of their income upon education, they say ” it is ” rather than I or we when concluding.

For example, “yepo imnida” means “beautiful it is” (polite form). The contextualisation is up to the readerly interpretation of what is presented by the author rather than ideas being given personal pronouns. This occurs in Pacific Englishee too..

By: Andrew Leigh

Andrew Leigh — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:10:30 +0000

Andrew, one thing that neither of us mentioned is the influence of which side of the Atlantic influences you the most. I think Americaphiles are far more comfortable using ‘I’, while Anglophiles tend naturally to ‘we’. (I’d be curious about how places like China and Japan handle this.)

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:14:54 +0000

Boris - I think when a fact is indisputable common knowledge, ‘we’ is acceptable. But where it is your own finding or conclusion ‘I’ is better.

By: Boris

Boris — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:23:06 +0000

I’ve just surveyed a recent paper where I was a sole author (a rare case for me). I found that I have “I” four times and “we” 9 times. In some of these cases I could (and probably should) have used “I”. But in some cases it would look funny. Especially a construction “in this case we have a=b”.

Maybe it depends on the field. I am sure math is more objective than sociology.

By: John Greenfield

John Greenfield — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:42:02 +0000

The rule banning “I” from academic writing is premised on the delusion of pristine objectivity of the writer. I have recently taken to using “I.” It is so liberating.

By: Ben Kraal

Ben Kraal — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:48:15 +0000

“I” is not uncommon in sociology, particularly ethnography and derivative fields where the existence of the researcher’s subjective point-of-view is unquestioned.

Recently I used “we” in a paper to mean “my co-researchers and I” — shocking, I know, to use a common English word in an academic paper in the normal way!