Alienating the 'I' from academic writing is a big risk, says Aslihan Agaogl – what you're doing is removing yoursel
The PhD is a lonely pursuit. Ask anyone who has ever done one and they will tell you that there is a lot of "me time" during your years ofresearch. It requires a lot of reading and writing, critical thinking, coming up with ideas, then throwing those ideas into the trash and coming up with new, and hopefully, better ones. There's no way around it, the process requires isolation.
This was one of the first things our programme director told us during our induction seminar: to be able to do a PhD, you need to not only to be okay with being alone, you have to love it. Love, that is, with a capital L.
You would imagine that with all this me time, all these academics living inside their brilliantly chaotic heads, having conversations with themselves (not in a crazy kind of way … or maybe just a little bit), academia would be more open to the expression of ideas and thoughts in the first person. But since common sense is the least common of all senses, this is not the case.