What’s Wrong With the “I” Word?

By Elisabeth Hanscombe

When I was a child the nuns taught us never to use the word ‘I’. It was too self-seeking. Better to slip into the passive voice, the way our university lecturers taught when writing up psychology experiments. A form of language that troubled me, even then. The idea that some mysterious person made things happen.

In English classes, it wasn’t easy, for instance, to write about what happened on the weekend, without inserting the word ‘I’. Even in fact-based subject...