Talk to Your Audience, not With Them.

Posted by admin

October 15, 2008

One of the common errors that I’ve noticed in my editing lately is the poor use of personal pronouns. This weakness in writing can seriously affect our academic work, and can obscure meaning.

What is a personal pronoun? Pronouns are words that take the place of nouns. Words like them, it, and her are pronouns. These words add variety to our sentence structure because we aren’t forced to repeat ourselves. Consider, for example, the difference between these sentences:

Pedro ran for student body president, and Pedro won handily.
Pedro ran for student body president, and he won handily.

The second sentence reads much more smoothly because the pronoun “he” takes the place of the noun “Pedro.” The first sentence sounds redundant, and the second has much more variety.

Personal pronouns can cause problems in our academic writing, however. When we write an essay or paper for class, it is important that we pay attention to the personal pronouns that we use. It is very important that we never refer to the reader with the personal pronoun “you.” For example:

When considering the text of Nostradamus, you can clearly observe…

Instead:
When considering the text of Nostradamus, one can clearly observe…

The second sentence functions better in an academic paper because it achieves a level of academic distance from the reader. It is important that you as a scholar present a tone of authority, and one of the easiest ways that you can acheive that tone in your academic writing is by avoiding the use of pronouns that refer directly to the reader. Take notice of your “yous” in your writing, and by eliminating them, you can easily employ an academic and scholarly tone.

Academic Writing, Editing

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