: Re: How do expert writers avoid using "I" when they have to refer to themselves in their article? How do competent authors, in a refined and perhaps (slightly) formal way, refer to themselves without

@Chiappetta298

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I see two main contexts:

The author of the work is also relevant to the subject under discussion. Then the author should use the third person and a name. "Reports must be submitted in triplicate to both Itsme and Steve Jessop". "Mr. Jessop has responsibility for X, whereas Itsme handles Y". It might matter which of us wrote that text, we might have collaborated on it. Someone who cares can check the top of the document, but it's not relevant to the matter at hand, so let's not mess about identifying professional responsibilities relative to authorship of the document.
The author wants to personalize the authorial voice. This generally isn't what you want in formal writing, but might be done from an excess of ego or an excess of honesty that you're writing a personal opinion or experience.

In this case, assuming you want to avoid "I", then you say "the author", "this author", "this reviewer", "this observer", and so on. Identify the role whose point of view you're trying to inject. So for example a journalist who attended a political event might first lay out the facts in the usual way, and then mention "this observer" when giving a more subjective view: "Following the speeches a fistfight occurred, but this observer was unable to determine who started it" makes clear that even to those in the room it was not necessarily obvious what was going on.

Whether you should want to avoid "I" at all is probably outside the scope of the question, but personally I think it depends in large part on whether you think the reader knows or cares who is addressing them. Extreme case, a newspaper report with no by-line shouldn't use "I", because the reader can't know who that is even if they want to. Even with a by-line, a reporter's style avoids it. An opinion piece has a lot more scope to use "I".

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