Should I use 'I' in my essay?

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We end, here, with a short note on pronouns.

Students often wonder whether to use the first person pronoun ‘I’ in their writing. Different disciplines have different conventions regarding the use of pronouns. You could seek guidance or look at examples of writing in your discipline to see how pronouns are used. If first person pronouns are avoided, students might say ‘This essay argues ….’ instead of writing ‘I will argue ...’.

TIP: Passive constructions can be useful for explaining an activity without using first person pronouns; 'A procedure was performed on the patient'.

Academic writing tends not to use the second person pronoun ‘you’. Instead of ‘You can see this in the graph below’, you could write ‘The graph below shows…’.

Although once seen as ungrammatical, the pronoun ‘they’ is now viewed as an acceptable, indeed preferable, third person pronoun in cases where one person is being referred to but the relevant pronoun is not known. For example, a research report might state that ‘Each participant was asked to make some notes about their experiences’. The use of ‘he’ as a generic pronoun should be avoided.