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Comment by muhdeeb | Hacker News Reader

Agreed! It’s pretty alien. I’ve seen brilliant single author work, but nothing that uses “I” unless it’s a blog post. The formal papers are always the singular “we”. Feels very communal that way!

Nice to include the giants we stand on as implied coauthors.

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Not being an academic, my (silent) reaction to singular "we" in academic writing is usually, "We? Do you have a mouse in your pocket? Or do you think you're royalty?" It's nice to hear of your more charitable interpretation.

There are, notably, two different if frequently confused “academic we” conventions, distinguished by their clusivity[1]: the inclusive “academic we” in constructions such as “thus we see that ...” refers to the author(s) and the reader (or the lecturer and the listener) collectively and is completely reasonable; the exclusive “academic we” referring only to the single author themselves, is indeed a somewhat stupid version of the “royal we” and is prohibited by some journals (though also required by others).

Yeah, it's the exclusive version that bugs me: "We tested the samples to failure on an INTRON tester under quasistatic conditions." It's nice to hear some journals prohibit it.

passive voice in that case

Yes, the passive voice is a good alternative, but sometimes people use the royal "we" instead.

A physicist with a similar mindset used to add his cats to his papers because of this dilemma.

You might want to read the story of F. D. C. Willard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard#Background

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