Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

Question everything they
taught you at school
Why is it so hard to convince ourselves that writing is just a kind of
talking on paper? I think it’s because we get told the opposite so
early and so often. We learn, at home, on our way through school,
and then at work, that writing is supposed to be different from
speaking—less voiced, less plain, more impersonal, more circumspect,
more polysyllabic, smarter, more proper all round. We get
drummed out of us the one piece of wisdom that would help us all
write better.
This all began the day someone told you to use the passive voice
when expressing conclusions in an essay.When they told you never
to write ‘I’ in your history and science papers—in any papers.That
day happened the other week to my daughter. It’s the day you learn
that you don’t belong anymore in your writing. The day when it all
starts going wrong. Remember that day?
What they were trying to teach you was the virtue of disinterested
inquiry and dispassionate expression. But they may not have
made that clear.
For anyone who still believes in the idea so emphatically
insisted upon in some schools and academic disciplines,
particularly the sciences, that ‘I’ has no place in serious
writing, consider this: Charles Darwin, who knew a
thing or two about scientific inquiry and exposition,
begins his great book The Origin of Species with ‘I’, and he
uses it liberally, and utterly appropriately throughout. ‘I
will not here enter on the minute details on this subject
[the cell-making instinct of the hive-bee]’ he writes at
one point, characteristically, ‘but will merely give an
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