It makes your paper sound less formal. It takes away from your main argument. It weakens your writing. It sounds repetitive. The reader doesn’t care about your opinion, only the research. Those are a few pieces of “advice” I heard throughout high school and college in reference to writing with the word “I”. Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that there are types of writing where “I” should be left out. And I don’t think the advice I received was totally wrong. Actually, it helped me write strong and quality academic papers. But now a dilemma has presented itself. I don’t know when to say “I”. As I pursue