Reviewer of PhD thesis doesn't allow me to write in the first person singular

Question

In my PhD thesis, I often used the first person singular during the description of the problem and the discussion of the results. One comment from the reviewer states that because I did not use the third person, the entire thesis must be revised accordingly.

I understand that in a journal article one should use the third person to describe the problem and discuss the findings. However, I always supposed that one can use the first person in a PhD thesis because I saw many researchers doing so. Could anybody give me a suggestion about how to deal with the reviewer who doesn't accept my choice to write in the first person?

Answer 1

With due respect - everyone's answers here are mostly irrelevant. The suggestions, ideas and perceptions we here on Academia.SX have on this issue are not the authoritative answer you need to get you past the review.

You need to talk to:

1. Your advisor
2. The administrator in charge of the "thesis phase" of PhDs in your department or your graduate school

They have some or lots of experience, respectively, with this situation, and will tell you what you should/must do when faced with such a demand from a reviewer. They may also contact the reviewer on your behalf if they believe s/he is wrong, or to explain the regulations to him/her etc.

Note that it might even be the case that you're expected to use the first person, and other reviewers will get annoyed if you switch. So you can't just cater to one person - you need to check what the default is.

Answer 2

There is an annoying truth here: What's OK in a PhD thesis and what not largely depends on the reviewers. Some people in academia have a huge inflated ego and prefer things to be done as they suggest, and the reviewer in your case is possibly among those people. You don't want to fight with them on this kind of issue.

If the reviewer has other comments that tend to create additional work without clearly improving the thesis, you may consider exchanging the reviewer.

Answer 3

There is no steadfast rule that applies across disciplines, countries, fashions, and personalities.

Do what makes your reviewers happy. Their demand is annoying, but not utterly unreasonable. More importantly, they decide over your defense and thereby your future.

This is not something worth fighting over, and certainly no reason to change supervisors.

Answer 4

We think that they can either suck it up, or keep using they as it clarifies very much the thesis. And by they I mean you, by we I mean they, or something like that.

I wrote my PhD thesis by putting "I" everywhere when the norm was a vaporous "we, the people". I wrote it, together with MY brain and, most importantly, MY ego. The dog did not type it either, though we could be all-encompassing.

I find it ridiculous to use a metaphorical "we" or "they", or "the neighbour" when talking about one's own work. We should share their salary, while we are at it.

Now your question is whether you can do something or not, which is completely up to the jury or referrer. Sure you can. And sure they can make your life miserable.

Answer 5

Despite this academic's personal embrace of first person writing, many respected colleagues despise even a hint of first person narrative. In their honor, here are a few ways writing improves without the first person.

• Phrases like "I think that" and "I believe that" often sneak into writing and water it down. Excising the first person can make the arguments bolder, as well as more readable.
• Even in presenting results or discussion or a conclusion, "I find that..." might already be implicit. For instance, replacing, "I find that the sky appears blue," with "The sky appears blue," yields a stronger topic sentence for the paragraph. Again, sentences can gain authority while becoming briefer.
• More broadly, the best writing tells a story. However, the narrative that is often closest to an author's mind is their own journey through the topic. Only exceptional circumstances make that autobiography a compelling narrative to frame a research paper. Instead, "storytelling" should almost always give the reader insight into the research, perhaps by highlighting an incident captured in and illuminated by the data, or a metaphor to characterize molecules' motion, or as the puzzle of why X commonly happens after Y.

As other answers here emphasize, if that committee member cares enough about this point and must approve the final draft, then editing it is the wisest course of action. If there are hints (from that person or others) why they care, that may allow for compromises that meet those objectives without a full edit, or it may at least make the time spent editing out "I"s feel less bitter. And upon reviewing sentences in the thesis that use the first person, if patterns emerge, editing only the frequent, most problematic contexts (such as "I think...") may appease that reader.

(This answer uses neither the first nor second person, without relying on the passive voice. It is possible by (occasionally) relying on the impersonal pronoun, using gerunds to discuss action without having to identify an actor, and making inanimate things into grammatical subjects. It makes for an annoying writing experience, and hopefully such edits will not be mandatory after all for the thesis in question.)

Answer 6

As a side point, It is very convenient to use the term "we" in a draft of a paper, in the off-chance that an additional author joins for one reason or another (someone you consult makes a significant contribution, two articles with similar content are independently published on a pre-print server, and a joint paper is in order).

Also, some boiler-plate introduction of terms/notions can be almost copy-pasted between projects, some with one author, some with several. Changing all 'I' to 'we' must be annoying.

Answer 7

A lot has been covered by other answers, but I just wanted to add something that came up while I was working on my thesis.

The faculty at my university always suggested that in the "Contributions" section (of the Introduction), you list your contributions in first person. For example, "I was responsible for implementing X on Y and testing Z", "I authored a paper in IEEE Transactions on ABC" and so on.

For the rest of the thesis it was passive, but that one section was handled differently. Of course, discuss this with your supervisor and reviewers first.

Answer 8

1. Writing style is not a big deal. If you have a strong and reasonable opinion about style, you have a good chance to defend it, because people won't care too much.

2. Depends on the country, but I think in general, not all reviewers get to approve the final version of your thesis. Some suggestions of those who do not, especially suggestions about style, can be silently ignored.

3. If "third person", as in "he" or "she", is actually what you meant to say then it does not seem common in the West, which makes it more likely that you can just ignore this suggestion.

Answer 9

I am in favor of clear writing and against the academic attitude. All that said, I would still go ahead and write it like a normal journal article. Use the third person and the "we/our" for most of the results. After all, you will probably add at least your advisor to the co-author list of papers coming out (or have already done so if you already wrote the journal articles).

Just scanned my thesis, which was mostly stitched together chemistry papers. Not like a European one where all it is, is the papers themselves. But pretty clearly taking different papers and with some minor edits changing them into chapters (e.g. combining redundant methods). I was pretty much either talking about the chemicals or using the passive voice or saying "our" for discussion of interpretation and such. But these were sections where I had co-authors, professor at least.

I did have one minor area (other than acknowledgements) where I used first person and got no static for it. Within the Intro, after giving a review of previous work, I discussed the research objectives (in a one para section called that) and used "my" in context of "my goals changed during the student. Initial my goal was X; subsequently it was Y. Didn't get any static for this--it was a helpful para to explain why the chapters to follow in the thesis were connected.

There are a lot of other areas where you can cut the crap and be honest (for example, I shared some important lab safety learnings and equipment construction that was helpful to subsequent students but really fit in a thesis more than a results journal article. I did that on purpose because the main audience was/is future group members.

But I wouldn't make a big deal of the impersonal style. Some of it is good (keeping attention on the chemical, not the researcher). Some of it is bad (pompousness, or not taking responsibility). But overall, it's not worth worrying about.

Get the union card done. Thesis is pass-fail and very little read. Don't mess with it too much, just wrap something up, get a job and boogie. Defense committees can be very accommodating as long as you have published well (already showing ability to make solid contributions) and have gotten someone to hire you!

Answer 10

One quick solution could be to find another example of a thesis that has already been approved by your institution which also uses first person singular. If there is a precedent it might justify your use.

I remember that one of my reviewer comments about "aesthetic" language issues like this which I ignored: the reviewer suggested that I had not used a real word, I provided a link to a dictionary definition of the word, stated that it was a matter of preference, and that I would keep my original choice of word. (I do not claim that all comments can be rejected in this way, but my point is that it is possible.)

Answer 11

In my opinion, avoiding first person and sticking to passive voice is beneficial for two reasons, one philosophical and one practical.

Starting with the practical - parts of the thesis are likely to be used as a base for subsequent journal articles. As the OP says, journal articles have a fairly set format. By sticking to the same format in the thesis, a lot of redundant writing effort could be saved. It would also be a sort of dry run- one can identify problematic/ambiguous phrases/paragraphs, which are to be avoided in later manuscripts.

On the philosophical front, any piece of scientific writing should, IMO, primarily convey scientific results and secondarily the methodology used by the researcher. Certainly, researchers deserve credit for novel methods followed, but this shouldn't overshadow the results/inferences. I believe passive voice acts as a safeguard against this.