What is the first, second and third person?

I realised that - despite having explored whether writing in the first or the third person in academic writing is more 'appropriate' - we had missed the first step... and had not defined what the first or third person IS.

So we will do that, then we will chew over a few ideas as what is 'appropriate' really is a difficult question to answer. It seems to fall into the 'it depends' category.

• The first person voice is where we stand in the story-tellers shoes as 'I' and 'me'. A statement such as "...we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender" is in the first person: we own the statement (Churchill, 1940, s. 796). The first person "perspective works well when the story includes personal experiences, observations, and reflections. With first person, you tell the story as the narrator using the pronouns I, me, mine, we, our, and us" but we need to also understand that this perspective can "feel subjective" (Felder, 2012, p. 123)
• The second person voice is where we write directly to others, as 'you'. We might say "...you will defend your island, whatever the cost may be. You will fight on the beaches, you will fight on the landing grounds, you will fight in the fields and in the streets, you will fight in the hills; you will never surrender" (after Churchill, 1940, s. 796). As we can see, second person can be good for "instructions or explanations" (Felder, 2012, p. 123), and not very good at teambuilding or persuasion. This is a 'telling' voice
• The third person voice is where we are, effectively, the faceless researcher. We use collective pronouns such as 'they' or 'them', and might say "the people will defend their island, whatever the cost may be. They will fight on the beaches, they will fight on the landing grounds, they will fight in the fields and in the streets, they will fight in the hills; they will never surrender" (after Churchill, 1940, s. 796). We use this voice for writing which we want "to feel more objective", where we want to put the research into the foreground, and ourselves into the shadows (Felder, 2012, p. 123). We are more remote; we have moved away from the action.

It has been suggested that "personal experiences communicated in the form of an academic paper and written in a narrative style would be deemed more personal than that conveyed in a third person, formal style" (Djenar et al., 2015, p. 18); by acting as narrator, we unmask ourselves, and become a person to the reader. Whereas "Scientific writing is not of a personal or conversational nature", which appears to be a proxy for the first person voice being "commonly used. As a general rule, personal pronouns such as I, we, you, me, my, our and us should not appear, except in quotations" (Elliot, 2005, p. 167, citing Anderson & Poole, 1994, p. 6).

The following paragraph brings together a number of the issues with whose voice we take in our writing - being inauthentic; appearing science-like; and conveying false objectivity: 

"It feels contrived to talk about oneself in the third person and goes against rules of language as performative practice. This convention is a remnant of positivist objectivist writing in the natural sciences, which was transferred to the social sciences and the humanities – probably to try to give it the status of the hard sciences".

"The use of the first person does not impact on the formality or the persuasive character of the language, but could add to it" (Henning et al., 2005, p. 92).

Good luck with working out whose shoes you prefer to stand in (and yes, that is the second person ;-)).

Sam

References:

Churchill, W. L. S. (1940, June 4). "We shall fight on the beaches". In His Majesty's Government, House of Commons Debates (Vol. 361). Hansard. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/jun/04/war-situation

Djenar, D. N., Mahboob, A., & Cruickshank, K. (Eds.) (2015). Language and identity across modes of communication (Vol. 6). Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

Elliot, J. (2005). Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. SAGE Publications Ltd.

Felder, L. (2012). Writing for the Web. Creating compelling web content using words, pictures and sound. New Riders.

Henning, E., Gravett, S., & Van Rensburg, W. (2005). Finding your way in academic writing (2nd ed.). Van Schaik Publishers.