Dear colleagues,
a couple of links I have found useful in this context (that I haven't seen
mentioned yet):
1. An interesting blog article, with further links:
http://eloquentscience.com/2011/02/are-first-person-pronouns-acceptable-in-scientific-writing/
2. American Psychological Association:
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/use-of-first-person-in-apa-style.html
3. Discover Magazine:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2007/05/22/we-know-the-answer/#.VgEWk_ntlBd
To turn to Anne's question 2:
I think that there is a very interesting development in German academic
writing in regard to personal pronouns. When I read the old German great
ones - the Rankes, the Sombarts, even Max Weber, i.e., the ones who were
among the founding members of the social sciences, they used the first
person in some of their academic writings. With the turn to
Gesellschaftsgeschichte (and other similar movements) in post-war Germany,
especially in the 1960s, this stopped, and the passive became dominant;
indeed, anything else was simply not allowed. This became such common
practice that textbooks on German academic writing (often for those
studying German as a second language) referred to three "taboos": 1) use
of personal pronouns, 2) use of metaphorical language and
3) telling a story (Ichtabu, Metaphertabu und Erzähltabu). (And by the
way, the fourth thing you were taught to do was to nominalize
(Nominalstil). In the last fifteen years (or so), there has been a
backlash against this - strongly influenced by "how to write well" books
in English. In fact, many of the how to write well books used in German
journalism classes cite the English writing textbooks (I am thinking of
the works of Wolf Schneider). In other words, one of the unintended
consequences of English as a scientific lingua franca has been to
influence the rhetorical conventions in German.
Best regards,
Jeffrey Verhey
Humboldt University
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