Reflections on writing

Abstract

B eing published rather extensively, I am accustomed to reviewers' comments, their conflicting suggestions, and other idiosyncrasies. For the most part, like other scholars, I pick my battles and issues with care, being ever cognizant that taking oneself too seriously is a most unattractive attribute. However, recently I have been criticized by several reviewers for using first person pronouns in several research and expository papers. This puzzles me, particularly when I consider the two decades or more of literature written by several feminist, naturalistic, and postmodern scholars urging the social science community to find its voice.l-3 These scholars argue that scientific writers should abandon their fruitless search for objectivity and expose the limitations of the I/eye of the author, by writing in the first person and describing the interaction between what is being observed and who is doing the observing. Amid the widely recognized failure of the social sciences to ground themselves in methods and theoretical commitments that can share the scientificity of the natural sciences, many of our reviewers persist in promoting a traditional social science writing style. This traditional social science writing enhances the authority of the author by making the author disappear, leaving only the impersonal voice of truth speaking--usually in the passive voice. In nursing, as in the other social sciences, scholars have raised this form of