Dear Matthew,

We do not agree.

I do not mean by this that you and I do not agree with each other, although that may also be the case.

Best regards,

Howard

http://www.pidaychallenge.com/take-the-challenge

It simply seems strange to me use a different grammar for single author papers – even if doing so is both more honest and more grammatically correct…!

I wonder what the convention is in, say, philosophy, where single author works are common and grammatical precision is valued.

I’m all for the royal “we”. The first person in scientific papers has always sounded weirdly arrogant to me.

I suppose “I” could come across as a bit arrogant, but if you think about it you wouldn’t use “we” in this way in any other type of writing, so what is so special about a paper? It cuts both ways. Queen Victoria could use the royal “we” because she was talking about herself as a representative of the British people. According to her usage, in some weird way she actually was the British people. I wonder what the royal “we” is supposed to represent in scientific papers. “We” the scientific community perhaps? If so, it strikes me as slightly arrogant to think you can speak on behalf of the entire community, particularly if you are writing an argumentative quantum foundations paper that 90% of the physics community would disagree with as is occasionally true in my case.

I disagree with one of your examples though – “In section 20, we show ..” – there’s no “dear reader” there is there? (Or have I just failed….)

You are right. That’s what happens when you try to write a blog post after spending the whole afternoon de-”we”ing a paper. I guess there should be a fourth category of non-”dear reader” present tense “we”s. Note that the examples of unambiguously correct “we”s are all past tense.

I guess I am generally against this sort of present-tense “we” as well, at least if it is possible to get to the punchline more quickly without it. However, unlike the “dear reader” ones, I don’t think they can always be avoided. In the body of the paper you can make the sort of change I suggested, but in the abstract you wouldn’t be able to because you have no “section 20″ to set the context. You’d have to keep saying things like “this paper shows”, which is less snappy than “we show”. Well, at least that diffuses my arrogant overconfidence on this issue a little.

I had the opposite experience to you by the way – I had to take the “we’s” (many hundreds of them!) out of my thesis…

Now I am really troubled. There must be an alternative meaning for opposite that means “the same” that I do not know about.

I’m all for the royal “we”. The first person in scientific papers has always sounded weirdly arrogant to me.

I disagree with one of your examples though – “In section 20, we show ..” – there’s no “dear reader” there is there? (Or have I just failed….)

I had the opposite experience to you by the way – I had to take the “we’s” (many hundreds of them!) out of my thesis…