For Stan's ever-insightful and hilarious response to the videos, please see Stacy's post entitled, "Week 4/5: Response to the Videos." Once again, there will not be a separate post by Stan for the videos.
This is one of those things, methods, that came around in the classroom at my field experience. Writing in first vs. thrid person. My instructor had given the students the options of a R.A.F.T (sort of like a choose-your-own-assignment) for "To kill a Mockingbord." One of the students had chosen to write the newspaper editorial p.o.v. by one of the characters, addressing manners to female readers, and had written her paper using 1st person. The teacher asked me to read it and see if it read correctly. I did, it did, and I told the teacher. She said, "but she used a lot of first person." I explained that I thought that since it was an newspaper editorial addressing readers, the author would be addressing the reader's in first person. Sure it could have been written in 3rd, but that would have taken the importance of the arguement. Anyone reading this agree?
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3 comments:
Even when we had our guest speaker come in and have us grade her papers I was shocked that she said she let her students use first person in their papers. I went to a high school where we were basically banned from using "I," and it seems like it is forever a part of me to never use it.
But she got me thinking. It is important to teach students the impacts of first person. First person writing can make a persuasive paper less confident and not as strong as it could be. For example, if I had an amazing point in a paper, I wouldn't want to start it off with "I think you should go to the store;" rather, I would want to say, "You should go to the store." It seems to demand more of the attention of the reader and come off as more confident. However, does that mean we should completely rid our papers and writings of "I?"
In your case, Stan. I would say exactly what you would say. It is a P.O.V. and many times we say "I believe" or "I think." Sometimes first person shouldn't be avoided, but it is important to make sure that it doesn't diminish the quality and confidence of our writing. (FYI: I almost wrote "I think" in that sentence).
Oh, no. Another teacher than thinks first person equals lower quality. It makes me sad. I was a product of that. I was literally told that I COULD NOT use first person unless it was a personal essay or something of that sort. So I wrote much of what I did in school without really engaging myself in the work b/c I felt like I couldn't put any of "me" into it. But I really do believe that students can do very high quality work, very good research, etc. and still use their own voice. They have to be taught how to do it, but its possible. And I think students will learn more as a result and hopefully they will enjoy whatever it is that they are doing more.
I love writing in first person. But it does seem there's a phobia about it. I agree w/ you Elizabeth, for some reason, we don't trust it as much because it could make a persuasive paper seem less confident. Maybe that's because it seems too self centered, but arent we supposed to be confident about our opinions?
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