Should I write in the ‘personal’ or ‘impersonal’?
6th May, 2011 - Posted by stellacollins - 1 Comment
We’re often asked whether it’s wrong to write in the personal tone in business or science writing and whether it’s appropriate to write with more impact and to connect to people rather than write in the impersonal tone.
Most academic science writing is written in the impersonal because it’s not necessarily important who did an experiment – what people want to know about is what happened. And that’s fine when that’s the purpose of your writing, but we often work with people who need to write for other audiences and struggle with changing their style because they feel it may not be ‘correct’.
What’s interesting is that even academic science writing in the past was not ‘impersonal’ but ‘personal’ – the people doing the experiments appeared in the text, and it was the Victorians who began to remove ‘people’ from science and decided that the ‘personal’ style was incorrect.
I recently came upon this extract from Newton who used a very personal style to describe his experiment.
We’re not suggesting that you always use the personal style but consider the impact of this passage compared to if it had been written in the more usual impersonal style. What would be the difference to the reader? When do you need to include yourself or other people in your writing?
What are your thoughts?
Isaac Newton conducted the following experiment on himself when exploring the relation between the physical eye and the experience of vision:
“I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make [the] curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles r, s, t, &c. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with the] point of [the] bodkine, but if I held my eye & [the] bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet [the] circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or [the] bodkin.
“If [the] experiment were done in a light roome so [that] though my eyes were shut some light would get through their lidds There appeared a greate broade blewish darke circle outmost (as ts), & [within] that another light spot srs whose colour was much like [that] in [the] rest of [the] eye as at k. Within [which] spot appeared still another blew spot r espetially if I pressed my eye hard & [with] a small pointed bodkin. & outmost at vt appeared a verge of light.”
Posted on: May 6, 2011
Filed under: Uncategorized
1 Comment
Brian Ahearn
May 6th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Nice post Stella. Many of my blog posts are based on scientific research but I quickly noticed my audience (primarily business people) doesn’t want the detail of the scientific study. They want me to break it down into easy to understand terms then translate it in a way they can see themselves using it. Personalizing it in with a “here’s how I have used this” helps tremendously with that audience. That’s the value I add because most of them would never look at the studies.
Brian
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