Page 536 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

College research assignments often require you to come up with an
idea of your own and to augment it with research. When you

incorporate the work of others into your paper, you walk a tightrope

between subjectivity and objectivity. In the overall paper, you are

subjective in that you are taking a side, arguing a point. In regard to

the work of others, though, you must be objective: report it accurately,

look at it without bias, and evaluate it fairly. Even when your essay
takes a side, you are required to look without bias at the evidence on

both sides of the issue.

In academic writing, an objective tone is aided by use of the third

person, even when you are expressing your own opinion. Thus you

would write, “Several of Emily Dickinson’s poems reflect an obsession
with death,” not “I think that Emily Dickinson’s poetry reflects an

obsession with death.” How, then, does a reader tell which ideas are

yours and which are someone else’s? The answer is that any idea that

is not attributed to someone else with an in-text citation is assumed to

be yours.

Moving beyond summary to analysis is a big step. In high school, you

may have written papers that involved researching what the experts

have to say. In college, you prepare to become an expert yourself by

creating your own ideas and supplementing them with the work of
professionals in the field.