36 How To Maintain “You” In Your Research Writing
Yin Yuan and Sunayani Bhattacharya
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to
- Use the first person in academic writing to distinguish your perspective from others, communicate your specific positionality, and underscore your unique contribution
- Communicate the idea of writing from the particular identity positions you occupy
First person has an important place—an irreplaceable place—in texts that report research and engage scholarship. There are three reasons why this is so:
1. Objectivity and Integrity
Traditionally, the reasoning for avoiding use of the first person in academic contexts is that academic writing should be based on objective fact instead of personal opinion. As we have seen, however, argumentative writing is not the lack of opinion, but rather the careful presentation of an opinion that is supported by evidence and logical reasoning. Further, every argument is influenced by the positionality of its particular author, and to pretend otherwise is dishonest.
Thus, when you are taking a stance on an issue, first person makes sense. Defining your perspective gives your reader context for your stance. Consider these two positions:
- “As a volunteer at a bilingual preschool, I can see that both language immersion and individualized language instruction have benefits,” vs
- “As a principal at an elementary school with a limited budget, I would argue that language immersion makes the most sense.”
Without the “whole picture” that the statement of perspective implies, you might assume that the two claims disagree. The subtlety of the subject—who the writer is—lets you see quite a bit about why the claim is being made.
2. Distinguish Your Perspective From Others
The use of first person also allows you to carefully distinguish between your perspective and the perspectives of the sources you are using. Researched arguments work by engaging with a variety of different sources, and the more “voices” you add to the conversation, the more confusing it gets.
You must separate your own interpretations of scholars’ claims, the claims themselves, and your argument so as not to misrepresent any of them. If you’ve just paraphrased a scholar, making your own claim without quite literally claiming it might make the reader think that the scholar said it. Consider these two sentences:
- “Wagstaff et al. (2007) conclude that the demand for practical science writing that the layperson can understand is on the rise. But there is a need for laypeople to increase their science literacy, as well.”
- “Wagstaff et al. (2007) conclude that the demand for practical science that the layperson can understand is on the rise. I maintain that there is a need for laypeople to increase their science literacy, as well.”
The second formulation makes it much clearer that the “need for laypeople to increase their science literacy” is not part of Wagstaff’s claim but rather your own distinctive contribution.
3. Underscore Your Unique Intervention
Citing scholarship contextualizes and strengthens your argument; you want to defer to “experts” for evidence of your claims when you can. As a student, you might feel like an outsider—unable to comment with authority on the concepts you’re reading and writing about. But outsider status doesn’t only mean a lack of expertise. Your own, well-defined viewpoint might shed new light on a topic that the experts haven’t considered (or that your classmates haven’t considered, or that your professor hasn’t mentioned in class, or even, quite simply, that you hadn’t thought of and so you’re excited about). In that case, you want to say, “This is mine, it’s a new way of looking at the issue, and I’m proud of it.”
Those kinds of claims are usually synthetic ones—you’ve put information and/or interpretations from several sources together, and you’ve actually got something to say. Having something new to say increases the exigency of your argument in the larger, intellectual exchange of ideas. A scholarly reader should want to pay attention, because what you say may be a key to some puzzle (a cure for cancer) or way of thinking about the topic (interpreting Batman). That’s the way scholars work together to form large bodies of knowledge: we communicate about our research and ideas, and we try to combine them when we can.
Consider This Example
Yin Yuan, “The Melodramatic Mundane in South Korean Television,” Situations 16.1 (2023): 29-52.
K-drama scholarship typically identifies melodrama as the dominant narrative mode and a key element of Hallyu’s global success. But while melodrama is characterized by overdrawn affect and plot, K-dramas in the last decade have become increasingly invested in everyday practices such as cleaning, cooking, and commuting. These are “mundane” practices so routine that they lose attention rather than capture it, counter to the logic of a melodramatic imagination that, as Peter Brooks defines it, creates “drama—an exciting, excessive, parabolic story—from the banal stuff of reality.”
Yet, since the mid-2010s, K-dramas have married the seemingly opposed modes of the melodramatic and the mundane. This paper analyses the programming trend in order to theorize an emergent mode of Korean television that I call the “melodramatic mundane,” in which everyday life functions as the site of both sociohistorical oppression and creative transgression. As Ji-yoon An observes in a recent special issue on K-drama studies, current K-drama research has prioritized audience reception and industry analysis, while “textual readings of key genres and dramas are still lacking.” My paper is motivated to address this gap, not just because the increasing porousness between film and television makes K-drama a valid form of screen culture deserving of the kind of close analysis traditionally applied to film, but also because television’s centrality to everyday life means its narrative logics hold key sociological insights. By reading the “melodramatic mundane” within the context of social precarity in post-financial-crisis South Korea, and examining Because This Is My First Life (2017) and My Mister (2018) as two case studies, I explore how and why everyday life functions as analytical problem and imaginative resource in contemporary South Korea.
In the Write to Learn below, reflect on Yuan’s use of the first person in the academic essay excerpted above.
Write to Learn: First Person in Academic Writing
Defining Positionality
One of the ways in which you can synthesize the above ideas is to think about where you write from—your position in the world and an embodied individual. Writing is a deeply personal act, and the text that you write should reflect your identity as a knowledge creator. In other words, it should show how your various identity positions (race, gender, age, class, to name a few) intersect in the making of your perspectives. Stop and think about how you have come by the ideas for this research assignment;
- Where did you get the research topic from?
- What biases do you bring to the topic? What is/are the source(s) of these biases?
- What biases do you bring to the act of academic research? What is/are the source(s) of these biases?
- What privileges and limits do you have when it comes to accessing information?
- What privileges and limits do you have when it comes to understanding concepts such as inquiry, research writing, and revision?
Why Is Acknowledging Positionality Important?
- It shows the reader where you, the researcher, are coming from. It might help explain not just your credibility and interest in the topic, but also the potential impact the topic has on particular communities to which you belong.
- Doing so acknowledges the fallacy of the universal subject or “I,” and demonstrates that every text is rooted in a particular socio-historical context, including those that have the invisible or “objective” “I”. Implicit in the “objective I” is a Eurocentric position that has traditionally not felt the need to identify itself as specific and particular.
- Expressing your positionality in the text helps other researchers think about how they might apply your research to their context.
- Being mindful of your insider status within particular communities helps you be aware of the limitations and privileges that come with such status. This makes your research more rigorous.
- You write from your identity positions. Acknowledging them makes your writing more credible and transparent.
In the Write to Learn below, brainstorm ways in which you might draw on your personal experience for a research essay.
Write to Learn: Presenting Yourself in Research Essays
Attributions
“I Need You To Say ‘I’: Why First Person Is Important in College Writing” in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writings, Volume 1, Charley Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, CC AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Peña, Tracy and Jessica O’Brien, “The Purpose and Value of Positionality Statements,” Inside Higher Ed, March 22, 2024.
