VPSC56H3: Studio Practice

If you have been asked to write an assignment where you present your personal opinion about a topic, you should use first person narrative.

Here are some tips about first person from Grammar Girl:

In the subjective case, the singular form of the first person is “I,” and the plural form is “we.” “I” and “we” are in the subjective case because either one can be used as the subject of a sentence. You constantly use these two pronouns when you refer to yourself and when you refer to yourself with others. Here’s a sentence containing both:

I (first-person singular) look forward to my monthly book club meeting. We (first-person plural) are currently reading Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda.

The first-person point of view is used primarily for autobiographical writing, such as a personal essay or a memoir. Academics and journalists usually avoid first person in their writing because doing so is believed to make the writing sound more objective; however, using an occasional “I” or “we” can be appropriate in formal papers if the assignment allows it. 

Besides “I” and “we,” other singular first person pronouns include “me” (objective case) and “my” and “mine” (possessive case). Plural first person pronouns are “us” (objective case) and “our” and “ours” (possessive case). Those are a lot of forms and cases, so the following example of a sentence that uses the first person--with both singular and plural forms and all three cases--will, I hope, help identify the different uses:

I asked Sam to help me with my Happy New Year mailing, and we somehow got the project done early during the last week of December in spite of our packed schedules. I’m quite proud of us and ended up calling the project ours instead of mine.

For further clarification regarding the eight first-person pronouns just used, here’s a table:

The narrative voice you write in depends upon the type of writing you are engaged in. You will most often be required to write in the third person at the University level.

Academic writing is formal in tone and is meant to be objective. This means that the focus is on the writing rather than the writer, so the voice is “this essay”, “this literature review” or “this report”.

Objectivity requires that the paper you are writing should not be a piece of personal opinion, “I think,” or, “We believe,” but substantiated by research, giving evidence from scholarly works you have read. So you would use phrases such as, “Research suggests that…”, “Smith and Jones (2010) argue that…” “I” and “We” disappear from academic writing.

Adapted from: http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/320179/writing-in-the-third-person.pdf 

The third person is the most common point of view used in fiction writing and is the traditional form for academic writing.

In addition to having a singular and a plural case, the third person has genders and a neuter category:

Here is a chart with the third-person plural with the three cases: