Your discourse___First person or passive voice?
This is a tricky subject and I will try to look at it from different angles: Should your text be of a personal nature, flowing more or less like a narrative or should it be impersonal and objective, adopting a critical stance to your own output? Or should it be a hybrid of the two, where you switch from one mode to the other in different parts of your paper?
Many authors who write on the theory of creative practices suggest that these texts can also be seen as narratives that are strongly referenced, tracing this notion back to John Dewey and his famed book "Art as Experience." Elizabeth Grierson and Laura Brierly advocate a narrative stance to the extent that the title of their book on practice based research even incorporates the word "narrative." Graeme Sullivan is yet another author who places emphasis on narrative as a tool for practice based academic discourse.
Other terms that are often brought up within this context are "reflection" and "reflexivity," based upon the concept of the "reflective practitioner" that was developed by educational theorist Donald Schön during the 1980s, as tools for creating a theoretical discourse in studio art and design practice; and these terms also imply a first person address as the appropriate one since one reflects upon one's own creative actions within such a context.
Other advocates of a personal stance for this field are Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, who talk about an autobiographical approach to theory of artistic practice in page 129 of their book Practice as Research: Context, Method, Knowledge:
"Autobiography enables the practitioner to apprehend artistic practice by revealing personal experience, in the context of life stories, as the basis of research. It makes rationalization possible by the revelation of personal reflection, interweaving self-consciousness with experience. Thus the researcher becomes the principal investigator of their professional endeavours. The autobiographical method describes a way to explore the practitioner and their concepts involving the self, identity, history, time, narrative, interpretation, expetience and knowledge. It allows us to attend to issues that give meaning to our thoughts and actions as practitioners by picturing personal experience as a way of understanding aspects of reality. Through it, we can systematically take slices of our lives.
By using (auto)biography as personal history, and viewing events within an historical context, we are able to better understand a personal situation by bringing forward prior, related experience. Consequently, the composition of biographical material presents a way of encouraging reflexivity in studies about the visual arts and art education. The process uncovers aspects of personal and cultural influences from family, nature, educational and social conditions, and material things. Such an approach provides a foundation and reference to explain why people act the way they do."
I also favor the first person style of writing. I tend to look at all creative work (including academic writing) as a second-order cybernetic system that you build by bringing together seemingly disparate ideas and actions to form a structure of ideational nodes that communicate with one another and bring forth new outcomes and thoughts, which you can then further extend upon (more about this later, in a separate post ;-). According to Ranulph Glanville "second order cybernetics must primarily be considered through the first person and with active verbs. The observer’s inevitable presence should be acknowledged, and should be written about in the first person, not the third, giving us an insight into who these observers are." Therefore to me it seems to be not only appropriate but necessary to write in the first person, even when writing academically.
But now on to the flip side of the coin: I was burned very badly by my own convictions when I was asked to make a "minor" revision on my PhD thesis that involved converting almost the entire thesis from the first person to passive voice since the examiners did not find my approach rigorous and academic enough. Not even the fact that I had Glanville's quote at the opening chapter of my thesis, as an explanation as to why I had written in the first person, helped and I had to make the revision.
So, the moral of the tale is - use the first person address at your own risk! You will be fine whilst writing your MA theses at our university. No one around here will hold you to task over this issue. And I see plenty of reputable journals in all fields where the first person address is accepted, particularly so in technological fields where very often the projects that are discussed are undertaken by groups of researchers and consequently the paper is written in the plural "we." However, there may be occasions (and as it was in my case, they can be important ones that involve a lot of work) where the first person address will be turned down. So, be aware!
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Conclusion: What I will therefore suggest is to adopt a hybrid from of address: When writing about the background and the context of your work use the passive voice. Do this also whilst describing the work. When it comes to writing about your personal involvement, your process, your inspirations and so forth switch to first person since even I was not asked to change those parts to passive voice whilst revising my PhD thesis.
But now on to the flip side of the coin: I was burned very badly by my own convictions when I was asked to make a "minor" revision on my PhD thesis that involved converting almost the entire thesis from the first person to passive voice since the examiners did not find my approach rigorous and academic enough. Not even the fact that I had Glanville's quote at the opening chapter of my thesis, as an explanation as to why I had written in the first person, helped and I had to make the revision.
So, the moral of the tale is - use the first person address at your own risk! You will be fine whilst writing your MA theses at our university. No one around here will hold you to task over this issue. And I see plenty of reputable journals in all fields where the first person address is accepted, particularly so in technological fields where very often the projects that are discussed are undertaken by groups of researchers and consequently the paper is written in the plural "we." However, there may be occasions (and as it was in my case, they can be important ones that involve a lot of work) where the first person address will be turned down. So, be aware!
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Conclusion: What I will therefore suggest is to adopt a hybrid from of address: When writing about the background and the context of your work use the passive voice. Do this also whilst describing the work. When it comes to writing about your personal involvement, your process, your inspirations and so forth switch to first person since even I was not asked to change those parts to passive voice whilst revising my PhD thesis.