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Comment by futuremint | Hacker News Reader

This commenter gets annoyed by authors who write about themselves in the third person. This comment writer suspects the article's author thinks he makes himself sound less ignorant when he writes in the third person. Maybe the economist's editorial guidelines demand pieces light on content (or facts to backup the premise) be written this way to distract the reader; thinks this comment writer.

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The Economist has a particular and well-known style guide that all writing for the publication must follow, be it for the online version (like this piece) or otherwise - and as others have pointed out, one of their styles is using the third person and "this/your correspondent" as opposed to the first person. Similarly, they don't put author by-lines on their magazine pieces (and only initials on their online ones), although die-hard Economist fans can often recognize individual authors by their phrasing and subject matter.

If you're interested in more of their particular quirks of style - or want to see how well-specified the writing style is for a major magazine - most of their guide is available online at http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide/.

They also have a language blog [1] which often expounds on some of the details and consequences of their and others' style guides.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson

Thanks for pointing that out. I think that blog will get added to my regular reading, I like to geek out on language (programming languages mostly, but English too).

Wow, I was being a bit toungue-in-cheek about it as I don't read much Economist (when I do the author is rarely stating their opinion, I tend to prefer more factual/reporting pieces from them), but thats interesting. Learn something new every day it seems!

I also have found some success in trying to avoid pronouns when writing. It can lead to weird phrasings where one's opinion is stated as a fact but a majority don't seem to care much about that (pedants are in a minority). See!

This commenter hypothesizes that such a writing style is closer to passive-voice, and thus less likely to be offending or refuted, because it is easier to make less absolutist claims. Ideal for news sources, unless the reader desires useful information.

Actually it has to do with the fact that the newspaper doesn't sport bylines on their articles.

In blog entries they use initials since a variety of writers write for the blogs and to avoid confusion. Special reports have bylines too. While there may be contributing authors for a report it's byline is by the author responsible. Some guest articles are also signed, for example if Tony Blair writes a piece. The final article with a byline is the farewell piece by an outgoing editor in chief. Alas, this is a rare event, since the newspaper (which actually insists on referring to itself as a newspaper) had 16 editors in chief since it's founding. That was in 1843.

The paper's point is that it's a product of all editors and should speak with the voice of the paper. Thus the "Your correspondent" moniker.

They certainly never shied away from opinion, or tried to cloak uncomfortable opinion in weasel words.

It's a style enforced by the magazine. Probably seems better to them than the "royal we". Certainly better than the repetitive use of "I" favored by some. Kind of interesting how English forces us to deal with this issue all the time.

> Kind of interesting how English forces us to deal with this issue all the time.

How do other languages handle it?

I don't know. But I think they force you to deal with other issues. For example, in Hawaiian, the grammar for possessive pronouns forces you to indicate whether an object has a permanent or temporary relationship to the subject. In Japan they have different number systems for different kinds of things. Something like we have for a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions etc.

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