Students enter my First Year Composition class thinking that “I” is a dirty word. “Are we allowed to use ‘I’ in this essay?” they ask in the same daring but uncertain tone that they use to ask if they can curse. For them, “I” has been taboo, looked down upon because of the subjectivity, the lack of rigor, that it suggests. They have learned that using “I” is against the rules, and once they have consent to break those edicts, it is liberating and a little transgressive for them.

The question of first-person perspective allows my class to spend some time contemplating the nature of objective and subjective writing. After we develop a definition of the terms, I challenge students to come up with examples of objective writing. They usually volunteer genres like “textbooks,” “biographies,” and “newspaper articles.” We talk about the influence of the District Board of Texas and who gets to decide what is included, and not included, in textbooks. We consider how the biographies of political figures, say Reagan or Obama, might differ if composed by left-leaning or right-leaning writers. We note that although these writers might not be lying or fabricating information, what they emphasize or exclude might create a favorable or unfavorable impression. We look at how the framing of news stories prompts us to read and interpret their content.

Yet, as Tanya Cochran observes, despite these questions about and challenges to objectivity, academia continues to privilege it. In general, the academy holds that “subjective posturing inappropriately assumes proximity, intimacy, relationship—the personal; whereas, an objective stance appropriately assumes distance, detachment, aloofness—the impersonal. Supposedly, only then can one discover truth.”¹ This academic binary separates subjectivity and truth, suggesting that the former makes the latter impossible. However, Cochran argues that the awareness of subjectivity is probably more effective way to get to the truth than the facade of objectivity.

Once my students have come to the understanding that the persuasive and argumentative writing that they have done in high school is not objective, we spend some time discussing why their high school teacher’s forbid the use of “I” in their papers. I suspect this moratorium is due to teachers not wanting to read papers in which every sentence begins with “I think” or “I feel” or “I believe.” Not only are these signals, at times, needlessly redundant, but they also reduce the appearance of objectivity. Given the way in which we approach argumentative rhetoric, we want to appear as objective as possible, even if the reality cannot be attained. Why say, “I think that Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s role as a forerunner to the ‘Third Golden Age of Television’ is under-appreciated” when you can much more forcibly say, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s role as a forerunner to our current ‘Golden Age of Television’ is under-appreciated”? In the first example, it is my opinion, in the second, it is a fact.

Cochran describes a similar conversation with her students:

What I tell students finally is that it is impossible for affect—for our Selves—to be completely removed from our writing… Even if scholars disguise (their) feelings in their writing—by denying them, ignoring them, or retreating into stylistic choices that supposedly convey pure objectivity (e.g., passive voice)—emotion is still present, for even silence is a form of communication. What is most important, I explain, is that we are conscious of our subjectivity and ‚appropriately‛ acknowledge, interrogate, complicate, and incorporate those subjective bits into our scholarship.²

No matter how objective our writing pretends to be or how forcefully we assert facts about the greatness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it is almost always going to be colored by our experiences, perspectives and biases. What we write about it and how we write about it is going to be affected by our experiences. By embracing “I” in our writing, we can more readily assert some of those subjectivities. In fact, a more Invitational or Rogerian approach to rhetoric might encourage more “I think” and “I feel” statements as a way to open up, rather than close down conversation and debate, but those are not the rhetorical conventions that most academics are writing in or that most of our students are learning.

However, “I” does not just open the space for our rhetoric to be more invitational, it allows it to have more personality and more personal-ity.

Phillip Lopate, for example, discusses the evolution of “I” from a pronoun into a character. He is primarily discussing personal essays, but I believe (yes, I believe) that we can also think about this character-ization of “I” in terms of more academic writing. As Lopate notes, “‘I’ is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past.”³ In academic writing, we tend to suppress that “lush sticky past” and we teach our students to do the same by exorcising their “I’s”. But why? Why don’t we consider and leverage that past? We teach our students about developing their ethos, their character, their credibility, but the implication is that they do that by depersonalizing their essays, by ignoring much of their situated ethos. Instead of becoming characters in their essays, they are relegated to the sidelines as they narrate a synthesis of other people’s experience and expertise. If I have a student, who is an equestrian, writing an essay about horseback riding, shouldn’t he or she be allowed to bring his or her ten years of experience to the essay? Isn’t that a valid source of knowledge? As Cohran notes, “a personal touch is actually an essential ingredient” to writing because of its connection to Aristotelian Ethos.⁴ Instead of devaluing our students’ expertise, their “lush, sticky past,” and personality, we should teach them to use it to boost the essay’s authority, credibility, and character.

This incorporation of the writer’s past, experiences, and situated ethos is in keeping with the work of Heewon Chang and Carolyn Ellis, Tony, E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, who advocate for autoethnography and the use of the personal experience in academic (in their case sociological) writing. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner note that “autoethnographers recognize the innumerable ways personal experience influences the research process” and they promote an methodology that “acknowledges and incorporates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on researching, rather than hiding from these matter or assuming they don’t exist.”⁵ Rather than removing the “I” and the personal from their writing, they bring it into their work, attending to all of the ways that it influences and, in some cases, enhances their research. Likewise, Chang highlights the importance of “self-reflection, introspection, intrapersonal intelligence, and self-analysis” in her work.⁶  Here too, the “I” is not suppressed, but leveraged for what it can bring to the discussion and analyzed for the ways in which it affects the writer’s and researcher’s worldview.⁷

Of course, not all of the writing that students will be asked to do will be autoethnographical, nor should it be. But the work of the autoethnographists remind us of the value of the personal. Instead of hiding the personal by banishing “I”s from our essays, we should acknowledge it and teach students how to understand and negotiate the subjectivity and ethos that they bring to every rhetorical situation.