05 January 2006

The Word Nerd Experiment

Perhaps you've noticed, over the past few weeks, Word Nerd (er, um, I mean me) trying to refer to the writer of this blog (again, me) as "Word Nerd" like an overblown third-person (and perhaps schizophrenic) point of view. Word Nerd/I was encouraged to try this technique by my fellow colleague and blogger, Streetwise. Streetwise's advice was that the use of the Word Nerd in place of a personal pronoun would help readers relate.

What it seems like it's done to Word Nerd, I mean me, is make for some complicated sentences in trying to talk about myself entirely in the third person. It makes me cringe, even shudder, somewhat internally, hearing the voices of former English teachers telling me never to refer to myself as the "writer" or "the author" in a piece. The Word Nerd-in-place-of-me-or-I trend is just that, I think, and makes me want to go beg forgiveness from my teachers who taught me better than this.

So, Word Nerd is /I am contemplating scrapping this experiment and saying "me" or "I" when I mean "me" or "I" instead of having to redraft sentences multiple times to use "Word Nerd" instead. But, before I do, I'm curious if Streetwise was right?

Do you, the reader, find the Word Nerd references more personable? Cumbersome? Overused? Annoying? Let Word Nerd know. Or me.

2 comments:

Stacie Penney said...

Miss Information seems pretentious.
Average Jane only does it in the headings.
Yours resides somewhere inbetween.
It made more sense when you were anonymous, but since you've outed yourself, it seems superfluous.

(Miss Information and Average Jane can be found in my blog roll. I'm too lazy to provide the links.)

Ookami Snow said...

I tend to not like talking in the Third Person just because it really takes myself out of the writing.

But then again Ookami Snow is known to think that way. ^_^