Verb Tenses 29
age her, as I thought it came up well. But one of her examiners didn’t like it, and
grumbled at her use of the ‘royal’ plural. Perhaps he didn’t like being pushed into
agreeing with what Rima was saying. Perhaps the use of the first person just both-
ered him. Fortunately, he was not the kind of examiner to let personal prejudices get
in the way of a fair appraisal, and he passed the thesis. Such cases are increasingly
uncommon—of around thirty-five theses supervised by the authors of this book in
the last decade, all used ‘we’ and not one has been criticized for it—but do consider
the views of your supervisor.
There are some situations where it is just plain silly to stick to the third person.
Examples are given below from theses in the social sciences that were dutifully
written in the third person, except for the situations listed. They passed.
When you are recounting personal experiences:
I arrived in Sri Lanka in the first week of January 1991. By the end of the third week I had
dispensed with the research plan I had brought with me. Seven days of being in Sri Lanka
taught me more about the practical circumstances of research there than the 7 months of
reading had previously.
When you are stating personal opinions:
I would like to stress, however, that I am convinced that what has been written about the
Grameen Bank reflects reality in the field.When you are explaining the choices you made in research procedure:
I am not a native Bicolano so, though I understand the Bicol dialect, I cannot speak it
fluently, and people laugh at my funny accent. Though the average village person can
understand Tagalog (my own dialect, spoken by the people in Manila), the old and poorest
cannot. Moreover, because of lack of use, I had forgotten most of the Bicol terminologies.
Thus the Research Assistant was my interpreter. [Try putting this into the third person!]However, there are cases where the first person is inappropriate—you should not
imply, for example, that someone else’s experiences are you own. For example, if
your thesis includes material drawn from a co-authored paper and someone else, say
Smith, did the fieldwork, the uses of ‘we observed’ in that paper should be changed
to ‘Smith observed’. And, sometimes, overuse of the first person can blur the line be-
tween the observer and the cause of the events being observed—for example, don’t
imply that you are responsible for the laws of physics that led to a chemical reaction!
For a definitive perspective, go to the top five journals in your field and deter-
mine what style is used. Look, too, at the use of voice to see if it is first person
singular, active (‘I investigate’) or perhaps third person passive (‘the event was
investigated’). If your work is cross-disciplinary, settle on a single style so that your
work is consistent.
Verb Tenses
Some non-English languages don’t use tenses, but rely on the context to indicate
whether something happened in the past, is happening now, or may happen in the
future. In English we have such a rich collection of tenses that we often get them