Distancing

If you pick up a book on writing good plain English, you are going to be reminded the problem of starting a new paragraph using the word I.

It may not be particularly surprising to use words like I and me. But it's an accidental egocentric showing-off by using too much I. Too much I ends up looking like the Carmen Miranda song, I-I-I-I like you very much!

Here comes the example: I was going to get my flu shot when I bumped into an old friend.

We can re-write it as: On my way to get the flu shot, I bumped into an old friend.

Putting that I mid-sentence sounds far less intrusive. On another note, shifting from the I and disclaiming the me me me are serving a more important psychological purpose. Ask Elmo. When Elmo explains his commitment to the life of the mind, he favors constructions like "Elmo loves to learn!" Talking about ourselves in the third person, as I've learned from Daniel Pink's book The Power of Regret, is known as "illeism." An easier term for this strategy, as what social psychologists call it, is "self-distancing."

That's what I did after my laptop was stolen during my overseas training. It’s been twenty years and I still think about this nightmare. My slumped shoulders and devastated expression were heavier than two atomic bombs. To find a better way than rumination, I wrote email to my wife and friends, telling the story of KM instead of me. The fly-on-the-wall in me decided to zoom out and write in the third person. The distancing helped me to spend the next forty-eight hours doing everything I could to salvage the loss.

The secret of converting negative thoughts into third-person sentences, it turns out, is supported by scientific evidence. Third-person self-talk reduces worry and increases rational thinking, research shows. Randomly assigning people to use their own name, instead of "I", was shown to generate better fact-based reasons during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Try it.