I don't know how many times I talk to students about use of second person in writing. From asking students to examine peer texts to circling examples in class myself, the use of second person continues in the next draft. Students seem to replace second person use when it is pointed out, but they don't understand deeply and in an authentic way why use of second person should be avoided. Here are some of my further attempts to eliminate second person use:
First, pass out copies of Merwin's essay "You Are the Second Person" (the full text is at the bottom of the post). I found this essay in Merwin's Book of Fables, but it was printed earlier. Let students discuss Merwin's reasoning for use of second person and what using second person says about the writer. Students can then revisit their work and reflect deeply on how and why they choose the words they do. When they return to class, they need options better than replacing "you" with "one", so here are some questions to ask in conferencing:
1. Can the pronoun be inclusive, turning the "you" to "we"? Merwin believes so. If so, what are the ramifications of making the essay inclusive? Does this allow for an anecdote or personal connection that would strengthen the paper?
2. Can the pronoun be elminiated? Doing so means seriously rewriting the sentence, but sometimes when doing so, the sentence loses some of the passive voice as well.
3. Usually the second person use appears in the beginning or closing, so can other leads or endings be explored? After showing how use of the second person can be off-putting, giving students examples of strong leads and endings may help.
4. What function does the sentence with second person serve in the paragraph? Asking students to describe the function of the sentence allows you to have conversations about paragraph structure, which can lead to a conversation about better options.
What are some other strategies? I'd love to hear how other people handle this particular issue.
Here is the Merwin essay:
The Second PersonYou are the second person.
You look around for someone else to be the second person. But there is no one else. Even if there were someone else there they could not be you. You try to shelter in imagining that you are plural. It is a dream which the whole of the waking world is trying to remember. It is the orphan’s mother who never lived but is longed for and has been accorded a pronoun that is an echo of your own, since she has no name. Her temple is an arrangement of mirrors. But nothing stays in it. Think how you keep your thoughts to yourself, on your rare visits there. And how quickly you leave.
You are the second person. The words come to you as though they were birds that knew you and had found you at last, but they do not look at you and you never saw them before, you have nowhere to keep them, you have nothing to feed them, they will interfere with your life, you cannot hear yourself, the little claws, meaning no harm, never let you alone, so tame, so confiding. But you know they are not yours. You know they are no one else’s, either. Sometimes between sleeping and waking you really forget that you are the second person. Once again you have embarked, you have arrived, nothing is missing, nothing. The twilight is an infinite reunion. Then a messenger enters looking everywhere for someone. For the second person. Who else?
Made in the image of The Second Person, you never see your face. Even the mirrors show it to you backwards. Dear reader at times imagining in your own defense that I am the second person, I know more about you than I know about myself, but I would not recognize you. For your part, it is true that you do not know your own story. That it has all been given away. That it lies at the bottom of a river where everything joins it but no one owns it. No one admits to it. Why this elusiveness of yours, like that which lives in an animal’s eye? For you have to be found, you are found, I have found you. You make a pathetic effort to disguise yourself in all the affectations of the third person, but you know it is no use. The third person is no one. A convention. Can you never answer happily when you are addressed? Do I want you to?
No, you insist, it is all a mistake, I am the first person. But you know how unsatisfactory that is. And how seldom it is true.
–W. S. Merwin, The Miner’s Pale Children, 1970. Also in his Book of Fables 2007
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