Neither. Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you". It's about your audience, not yourself.
My brother when he was in college had a writing instructor that said if a student used "you" in a paper then they better buy her flowers.
Ask HN: I versus We
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#12It's all about emphasis.
Every sentence in my copy has a reason to be there, and the I/We thing isn't it. As it's important to not detract from the real message, I try and use what I think the reader might expect. This stops the reader from putting too much importance into my word selection on a point that I didn't intend to emphasize.
So I use both, depending on the context (although I'm sloppy unless I'm writing copy).
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#13My writing teachers never let us use "I" in high school, because it is considered poor form by most grammar purists.
What an odd thing for them to say. "I" is one of the most common words in the English language. I very much doubt even grammar purists would recommend against it. What's next? "'The' is considered harmful"?
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#14Neither. Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you". It's about your audience, not yourself.
My brother when he was in college had a writing instructor that said if a student used "you" in a paper then they better buy her flowers.
edw519 talks about website copy, your brother's writing instructor about coffee table literature. Big difference.
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#15Neither. Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you". It's about your audience, not yourself.
That doesn't sound like an answer to the question.
Your product website is going to have ten thousand words of text on it, much of it on a blog talking about your company and the product you're building. At some point you're inevitably going to need to use the first person, and that's what this person is asking about.
I use "We" for any official communication and copywriting for my products. For personal correspondence I'll often use "I", especially when talking about things I personally will be doing (ie., "I'll look into that").
For anything where more than one person is reading (site copy, forum replies, etc.,) I tend to use "We".
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#16My writing teachers never let us use "I" in high school, because it is considered poor form by most grammar purists.
The reason this rule exists is mostly because using "I" introduces the possibility of subjectivity, and opens up the argumentum ad hominem, both of can sometimes make a sentence weaker.
"You're 17 years old; what could you possibly know about the economic state of affairs in the Andalucia region of Spain? I'm going to go find a real expert, like the ones you've cited!"
Along similar lines is the moratorium on rhetorical questions, which open up the possibility that the reader's answer will be different from the one you want them to have, at which point you've let the reader make up his/her mind before you've had a chance to change it.
I think both bits of advice are useful sometimes (I particularly dislike rhetorical questions, as they usually feel like beating around the bush), or even most of the time, but I teach my students to avoid both (along with using "you" in papers) unless they can make a stronger argument with them (ethos is everything), in which case they should err on the side of making a stronger argument.
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#17My writing teachers never let us use "I" in high school, because it is considered poor form by most grammar purists.
What an odd thing for them to say. "I" is one of the most common words in the English language. I very much doubt even grammar purists would recommend against it. What's next? "'The' is considered harmful"?
I think the gp was in reference to writing academically, in which case it is often inappropriate to use 'I' as you should be writing in more absolute terms. I never did like that, though, as it makes your writing sound structurally dismissive of alternative viewpoints.
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
What an odd thing for them to say. "I" is one of the most common words in the English language. I very much doubt even grammar purists would recommend against it. What's next? "'The' is considered harmful"?
I think the gp was in reference to writing academically, in which case it is often inappropriate to use 'I' as you should be writing in more absolute terms. I never did like that, though, as it makes your writing sound structurally dismissive of alternative viewpoints.
It also leads to passive voice, which is sometimes appropriate ("Then three cubic centimeters of goat bile were added to the solution"; ideally, anyone should be able to perform this experiment, and the experimenter is out of the picture entirely), but in general, I agree with you.
The mental trick is to append "I think" to the beginning of every sentence and hope that that works.
Also: using the "I" opens up the argumentum ad hominem, which can focus criticism into uncomfortable territory ("Goat bile shouldn't have been added until after the solution was brought to a boil!", versus "You shouldn't have added goat bile until...." One of those is a bit more likely to be taken personally (albeit by someone with thin skin, perhaps as a result of too much exposure to goat bile)).
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#19It depends a lot on the perception you're trying to create. I can't find it now, but there was an article a while back that spoke to the benefits of having a dedicated identity for your billing department. In short, it helps to separate the you that negotiates contracts and produces from the you that asks for the money. Of course, if you were doing something like this, you would want to make sure you used the plural.
Re: Ask HN: I versus We
#20Neither. Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you". It's about your audience, not yourself.
My brother when he was in college had a writing instructor that said if a student used "you" in a paper then they better buy her flowers.
Well that is because collage papers are supposed to be written in third person to remove biasing the user by framing them in the situation. You are also not supposed to use, I, we, or us. You should never refer to the reader, author or researcher as an entity in of personal reference. In academic papers you are providing information not framing a story to build character development. It can seem kind of steril but it is done for a reason. That said, in the real world, you generally want to bias the hell out of the reader. Patio11 made a suggestion on a article once in which he suggested flipping all the we's of the article to you. I went back and reworked some marketing material I had to reflect that suggestion and was amazed at how compelling the once boring text became. The reason was simple it framed the reader in the conversation.