Use of first person in a book

[Chad J]

Lutger wrote:
> Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
> 
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>>>
>>>> How do you feel about
>>>> moderate use of the first person in a technical book? Do you find it
>>>> comfortable, neutral, or cringeworthy?
>>> I think it makes the book more like the product of a person, so I like
>>> it.
>>>
>>> I hate reading 10 research papers where most of them are written by a
>>> single person and all of them use "we can see" or "it can be seen". The
>>> first person author has become a ghost. Improving a research paper, or
>>> science, doesn't imply removing anything human. Using first person isn't
>>> synonym of bad science.
>>>
>>> Bye,
>>> bearophile
>> I totally agree with you here bearophile, even in high school for
>> certain forms of texts they told us to never use the first person, this
>> went on all the way up to college and we never were told why its bad. I
>> really hate that teaching method of "do this, don't ask why."
>>
>> Maybe because using the first person sounds closer to faith than fact.
>> But such enforcements are closer to what religion would do than science,
>> so its really confusing in the end.
> 
> It is the old school image of science as objectivity, where this means that 
> there is no subject: the author should be interchangeable for any competent 
> scientist because texts are produced by methods, not authors. These days 
> such a view is often regarded as a form of faith, and indeed some 
> philosophers see this idea of science as a late incarnation of theism.
>  

Interesting.

As I read this thread I conjectured that this rule was to help newbie
authors avoid pitfalls that are easier to hit if they use first person.
   I'm at a loss for examples.  And even if this were so, I'd much
rather my educators had just trained me how to better avoid the pitfalls.

Perhaps excessive use of first person makes an article/book read more
like a story.  Perhaps that's not really a bad thing.

It amuses me to see this thread where so many professionals and
well-educated peers are chiming in and rejecting this dogma.  I never
would have expected it to be so unanimous.