OBJECTIVITY: THE THIRD PERSON

Familiar Forms include the first and second person, singular and plural:        

These words must be used, sometimes, when speaking formally:

 use them as little as possible!

DO NOT USE THESE WORDS IN FORMAL WRITING!

You are not to use these words at the college level. At least not in writing and not at the beginning until you have mastered the fundamentals of reading and writing formal English.

NO ONE WILL LISTEN TO YOU OR READ YOUR WRITING SERIOUSLY UNTIL YOU CAN CONVERSE (COMMUNICATE) IN STANDARD FORMAL ENGLISH.

First you must learn to speak, to read and to write formal English and to master the details of your area of study (also called an ‘academic discipline’).

For the most part, college professors believe that students must first demonstrate that they can communicate in standard English and have learned what the academic community believes students should know before expressing their own opinions.  This perspective is partly the result of respect for all the thinkers, writers and intellectual explorers who have come before us.                 

It is also related to the idea that independence of thought comes from a mastery of the fundamentals of thinking. This is one of the skills that this site is targeted to teach you. I am encouraging you to think about what you are learning at the same time as you are learning it. In this way, as a self-conscious and self-confident learner, you can understand why you are learning what you are learning, how it fits into your life and the world, and how best to use your newly acquired knowledge and skills to make a better life for yourself and your loved ones.

OBJECTIVITY: THE THIRD PERSON

If you have never seen a chart such as the one below, it shows the ways in which the words we use have to change depending on what we are trying to express. This is a table of what are called 'declensions" or, how pronouns (and sometimes nouns) change depending on "case", which means whether the statement is about oneself, another individual or several other people. These are referred to as 'first', 'second' and 'third' 'person'. 'Singular' means when only one individual is involved; 'plural' is used when more than one individual is involved.