Twenty-Fourth Lesson

Using 'I' in your assignment

Students are often puzzled as to whether they can use the first person in their university assignments. The question is closely related to the large question of your relationship to your material, and your sense of your identity as the writer of the assignment. 

There may be a wide range of reasons for the use of the first person in a piece of writing. For example, you might want to signal that the ideas your are presenting are not definitive. It might be that you want to write about your personal opinion at some points and you want separate this from some other parts of the assignment where you do not use 'I'.

Often writer use 'I' in their introduction to establish their place in relation to their material, and then go on to present the material itself in a more distanced fashion Above all the use of 'I' can establish a sense of relation between writer and reader and between the writer and their material. 

In the following activity we ask you to investigate writers' use-or non-use- of the first person by looking at the some course material.

Activity Sixteen: The use of 'I' in course materials

Check some of the books or course materials you have to hand to see whether they use 'I' and, if so, where they use it and what the reason might be. Think about what effect the use or non-use of 'I' has on the relationship between the reader and writer.