Use of Person

First person is putting you (the author) into the paper using 'I', 'me', and 'my'. The main thing to remember is that you are not writing the paper to yourself but to a specific audience. If you write in First Person and the paper is all about you, then it will lack relevance and will thus have no meaning to the audience.

Never, ever, ever use Second Person pronouns in academic writing. This would include 'you', 'your', 'you're', 'you all', and 'ya'll' (also, never use contractions, but I will talk more about that in another post). Also, never use Second Person plural pronouns such as 'we' or 'our'. This is because you do not want to impose your feelings or beliefs on your audience or make assumptions about them. For instance, if you say 'our children are in a state of crisis,' my response would be 'umm, mine aren't; maybe yours are, but mine are fine.' Or if you say 'we all like birthday parties,' I would say 'umm, no I don't; birthday parties are dumb.' So never use Second Person, ever.

You should strive to use Third Person throughout your paper when you must use person: he, she, him, her, it, they, them. Where people sometimes get tripped up is being politically correct when using gender. If you say 'when a person is choosing a college, he/she should first look at location,' it can get tedious to always put in he/she after that. What you can do, is choose one gender and stick to that throughout. If you want to use 'she' that is fine, just be consistent.

The best practice when writing, though, is to use No Person At All! Try to rewrite as many sentences as possible with no person. For instance, instead of saying “'when a person is choosing a college, he/she should first look at location” you could say 'when choosing a college, location should be the top priority.'