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Know Your Purpose When Speaking in First Person

By Roy Peter Clark

I begin this essay with what may be an apocryphal story told to me by my great friend and writing teacher the late Donald Murray. I have never believed it, but he swore it was true. Don claimed that his editors at an old-time Boston newspaper had the capital letter "I" filed off of the typewriter keys of reporters. The goal was to keep those ink-stained wretches from writing personal stories or injecting opinion or point of view into news accounts.

"But what if the writer wanted to type Indiana or the name of Red Sox pitcher Ike Delock?"

"Tough shit." These editors tolerated no navel gazing.

It is the good fortune of readers that "I" -- the first person singular -- has been restored into nonfiction writing, even if its liberation has led to a plague of sappy or sordid or distended memoirs along the way.

"Person," according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is that grammatical category that contains "any of the group of pronoun forms ... that distinguish the speaker (first person), the individual addressed (second person), and the individual or thing spoken of (third person). Each pronoun has a corresponding verb form that creates what we call "agreement": I am, you are, she is.

We talk about three persons in one language, but for practical and strategic purposes it may help to think of six categories of person, each with a distinct set of purposes and a different range of effects on the reader or listener.

First Person Singular (I, me, myself)
This form of narration can be used to express:

• Reflection: "I grow old ... I grow old .../I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled," from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot
• Testimony: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" -- Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind
• Reliable or unreliable storytelling: "Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself in a dark wood ..." -- Dante's "Inferno"
• Confessions: "I believe that the more I loved him, the more did I hate and fear death, which had taken him away from me, as my cruelest enemy." -- St. Augustine's "Confessions"
• Remembrance: "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me." -- Marcel Proust, "Remembrance of Things Past"
• Opinion and other transparently subjective accounts: "� and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more." -- "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
• Shining a spotlight on the narrator and that person's place in a larger world: "I have a dream �" -- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

First Person Plural (we, us, our)
Useful for:

• Royal proclamations or papal bulls: "Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen ..." -- King Claudius in "Hamlet"
• Other official documents: "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..." -- Declaration of Independence
• Pep talks, especially to a team or army: We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ..."-- Henry V. by William Shakespeare
  
• Institutional editorial voices: "Why shouldn't the Daily Tribune pay the same rate ... as the Red Lobster ... The answer is, they -- and we -- should." -- Editorial by Michael Gartner
• Expressions of communal or collective solidarity: "We are family." -- Sister Sledge
  

I once believed the old school idea that shifting from the third person to first person should be a taboo, that switching perspectives creates confusion and distracts the reader from the writer's message. It is reasonable to observe such general practice without slavish compliance. But if you have a good reason to introduce "I" -- even late in a text -- do it, but be ready to defend it to skeptical teachers or editors.

Check back in two weeks for the second part of this article where I will discuss using second person and third person, singular and plural.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).