bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
How do you feel about
moderate use of the first person in a technical book? Do you find it
comfortable, neutral, or cringeworthy?
I think it makes the book more like the product of a person, so I like it.
I hate reading 10 research papers where most of them are written by a single person and all of them
use "we can see" or "it can be seen". The first person author has become a
ghost. Improving a research paper, or science, doesn't imply removing anything human. Using first
person isn't synonym of bad science.
Bye,
bearophile
I totally agree with you here bearophile, even in high school for
certain forms of texts they told us to never use the first person, this
went on all the way up to college and we never were told why its bad. I
really hate that teaching method of "do this, don't ask why."
Maybe because using the first person sounds closer to faith than fact.
But such enforcements are closer to what religion would do than science,
so its really confusing in the end.
What the first person does to me is make it easier to make links with
authors since it makes it much easier to convey emotion, the third
person just sounds like a robot making statements. I know there isn't
much room for emotions in programming books as opposed to the general
roman, but there is still a lot of passion to convey, programming IS an
art after all!
I guess it just goes in the ever growing bag of rules we all blindly
apply and never understand why. For one, I couldn't imagine this
newsgroup if the first-person was banned from use :)
