56 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality The practice of putting yourself into the shoes of your reader and viewing your own writing from as objective a perspective as you can possibly manage can be surprisingly enlightening and incredibly helpful. If you’re able to achieve a little distance from your work, you’ll also be able to read it as you might read the scholarly work of colleagues, and while this can assist you with managing far more than pronouns, it will almost always reveal problematic uses of pronouns that contribute to an unprofessional written voice. I am referring specifically here to the use in scholarly prose of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ (and ‘us’ and ‘our’ in the other declensions). ‘We’ can be used with impunity in academic or scientific writing if it refers specifically to the authors, and ‘I’ is equally acceptable for a single author. In fact, ‘I’ when used with discretion is often preferable to a third-person circumlocution such as ‘the present author’ and ‘we’ more appropriate than, say, ‘the present investigators.’ The two (‘I’ and ‘we’) should not be mixed, however: a paper either has one or more than one author, so it’s either ‘I’ or ‘we,’ not one in one paragraph and the other in the next. ‘We’ can also be used successfully (though with care) when referring to researchers or practitioners as a group, such as ‘we ethnographers’ or ‘we as surgeons,’ especially when your work relates to methodology and self-awareness. ‘We’ should not be used in scholarly writing, however, in a general or fictional sense that implicitly includes the readers or even the whole of humanity. Generalising, as any researcher knows, is a dangerous business, and when you include your readers in that ‘we,’ you also (usually unwittingly) imply that your readers are thinking exactly what you are. Assuming that your readers are thinking as you are can be one of the most certain and instantaneous ways in which to lose your readers’ sympathy. ‘We can observe that…,’ ‘We see here…,’ ‘We now know that…,’ ‘We human beings do not…’ and similar phrases can rapidly become irritating, especially if the author has not provided PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk