Using "I" in a Formal Essay

The answer changes by subject, not by formality

Formality is the wrong axis. Plenty of formal writing is in the first person and plenty of informal writing is not. What decides it is whose judgement the task is asking for, and where the evidence sits.

Where the marks are for your reading of something, a first-person judgement is legitimate. Where the marks are for a measurement, a source or a documented fact, putting yourself into the sentence puts you between the reader and the evidence.

• English Literature — allowed. The assessment objective asks students to maintain a critical style and develop an informed personal response, so the response has to be yours; the pronoun is optional.
• English Language writing tasks — decided entirely by the form you were asked to write. A speech uses "I"; an information leaflet does not.
• History — avoid in source and interpretation answers. Replace "I think this source is unreliable" with whatever makes it unreliable.
• Science practical write-ups — avoid. The impersonal passive remains the school convention: the mixture was heated to 60°C.
• Personal statements, reflective logs, coursework evaluations — required. Removing the first person removes the point of the task.

The three sentences worth learning to rewrite

Nearly all the first person in school essays comes from three habits, and each has a standard replacement that is shorter and stronger than the original.

Notice what each rewrite does with the space it recovers. Every one spends it on actual content — a reason, a claim, a figure. That is the argument for the rewrite. It is not that "I" is impolite.

• "I think Macbeth is ambitious" becomes "Macbeth's ambition drives every choice he makes after Act 1." The claim was yours either way; dropping the hedge stops it apologising.
• "In this essay I will argue that…" becomes the argument itself. The reader knows whose essay it is and can see that it has started.
• "I found that the temperature increased" becomes "The temperature increased by 14°C over six minutes." The number was the point; the person who found it was not.

Why "I think" weakens the claim it was meant to protect

Students add "I think" out of caution, in case the reading turns out to be wrong. It does the opposite of what they intend. An essay is already a set of your claims, so flagging one of them as an opinion tells the reader you are less certain of that one than of the others — which is rarely what was meant.

If a claim genuinely needs hedging, hedge it with a reason instead of a pronoun. "Macbeth may be reading the prophecy as permission rather than prediction, since he acts before the witches have said he must" is properly cautious and shows working. "I think Macbeth wants to be king" is merely quiet.

The over-correction is worse than the original

The failure mode after this advice is a paragraph built entirely from stacked passives: it could be argued that it might be suggested that the reader is perhaps intended to feel. Every person has been removed from the sentence and so has the claim. A marker cannot credit an interpretation that nobody has committed to.

There is a middle register most students are never shown, and it is the one academic writing actually uses: make the text, the evidence or the idea the subject of the sentence. The play withholds Macbeth's reaction until the next scene. The source was written for a government that had already decided. No pronoun, no fog, and the sentence is carrying something.