A personal tone isn't unobjective

When W. Brian Arthur couldn't get his big economic idea to read, his friend Cormac McCarthy — yes, the novelist — spent four days taking apart every sentence. One thing McCarthy stripped out was the reflex that "professional" writing must be impersonal and passive. That reflex rests on a myth: that removing yourself makes the writing objective. It doesn't. "Earth is the centre of this Solar System" is no more objective or factual than "We are at the centre of our Solar System" — the passive, impersonal version just sounds colder.

How it works

Let a person into the prose. Use "we" and "you" where they're true; inject a question now and then; allow a contraction. A personal tone engages the reader, and it costs nothing in rigor, because objectivity lives in your evidence and reasoning, not in the absence of a first person. The academic instinct is to launder the human out of every sentence to seem authoritative; the effect is prose that reads as evasive and tired. Keep the accuracy; drop the disguise.

Why it matters

Readers trust and follow a voice; they endure a void. Impersonal passive writing signals "serious" to a writer and "skip" to a reader, and it doesn't even buy the objectivity it's trading for — the facts are exactly as true stated personally. This is also part of what a machine can't fake: a particular person, willing to be present on the page, is the opposite of the averaged non-voice of generated prose.

Try it

1. Find the impersonal passives ("it was found," "the data suggest") and ask whether a "we" or "you" would be truer and clearer.
2. Add a question or a contraction where the tone has gone stiff — a small human signal that you're talking to someone.
3. Check that your objectivity lives in the evidence, then stop performing it with cold syntax.

Common pitfalls

Mistaking personal for sloppy — a personal tone still argues rigorously; it just doesn't hide the arguer. And overcorrecting into chattiness or oversharing, where the "I" crowds out the idea; the goal is a present voice, not a loud one.

Impersonal, passive text doesn't fool anyone into thinking you're being objective. "Earth is the centre of this Solar System" isn't any more objective than "We are at the centre of our Solar System."

CORMAC McCARTHY · WRITING ADVICE · 1996

Objectivity is in your evidence, not in deleting yourself from the sentence.

Drawn from

• William, The Writing Secret That Turned an Unknown Academic Into a Thought Leader (Writer Science, 2025).
• Cormac McCarthy's writing advice to W. Brian Arthur, on "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business," Harvard Business Review (1996).
• Related: Voice is lived experience, not word choice, Out-human the machine, Use the passive voice for flow.