Use of first person in a book

[Lutger]

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.
 
> What the first person does to me is make it easier to make links with
> authors since it makes it much easier to convey emotion, the third
> person just sounds like a robot making statements. I know there isn't
> much room for emotions in programming books as opposed to the general
> roman, but there is still a lot of passion to convey, programming IS an
> art after all!
> 
> I guess it just goes in the ever growing bag of rules we all blindly
> apply and never understand why. For one, I couldn't imagine this
> newsgroup if the first-person was banned from use :)

The texts I find most inspirational are mostly witty or lively in one way or 
another, even if they are very technical. I believe it is because the author 
is passionate about the subject and cannot help but convey the pleasure they 
take in it.