With All the Formalities

I'm currently in the process of plowing through the end-of-semester rush of assignments that always comes at university; it's like all the papers forgot they have to get another assignment done, so they hastily tack it onto the last week or second to last week of the semester. Of course this is never the case; assignments are planned out at the beginning of the semester, so those of us who have to do them can't use the old excuse "it crept up on me and covered my eyes so i couldn't see it".

One of the worst things about doing a report is the level of formality usually espected. In my first Practical Work Report (Practicum 1) for engineering, i had my mark downgraded because the report was "too personal", and "felt more like an essay than a report" to be fair the man was right. I used the letter "I" far too much, but my excuse was that i was writing about a personal experience. How else am i supposed to write about diagnosing a problem with an offshore tide monitoring station. My computer didn't diagnose the problem, it didn't diagnose itself; I did it. For my latest statistical report i decided to make it pretty casual: the lecturer is a fairly laid back and funny sort of guy, so i thought i'd throw a few colloquial terms in there, use "I" alot (after all I was the experiment), and talk about walls of text.

It got me thinking, why can't all reports be like this? I can see how it might be regarded as unprofessional to not be as objective as possible, and how you could get bored of someone talking about themselves. But when describing what actions you took, surely the use of "I" is not prohibited. For me it's boring just writing like this about personal experiences. I can be objective about things that just happened in my presence, or decisions that were made not just by me. Anyway objectiveness is just the tip of the ice berg. I also tend to be the sort of person that doesn't make good use of appendices; i prefer not to include irrelevant material in my report, and if it's that relevant it should really deserve to be up front, in the body of the report itself.

Ah well i guess it's all hopeless in the end. So much depends on standards and compliance in the modern world. I'll learn to change my ways in the end.