Better Ways for One to Get Out of Second Person

There are better solutions to one's use of second person. One should avoid using one's easy way out. One may risk sounding pretentious.

In student writing, I often find odd sentence structures full of the subject "one". By replacing "you" with "one", writers take the obvious, lazy way out of fixing their accidental second person. "One" should remain numerical and not be shoehorned into pronounship.

“Sloppy fixes for second person can quickly refocus the reader from a professional or academic topic to the grammar.”

Writers who have a specific audience in mind are often tempted to write directly to their audience, as if they were speaking to them. Readers of professional or academic writing, on the other hand, prefer to approach reading with a level of impersonal, objective distance. When writers incorrectly assume the reader agrees with them or directly address a reader that isn't expecting it, the readers are caught off guard and are likely to disengage with the topic. Sloppy fixes for second person can quickly refocus the reader from a professional or academic topic to the grammar.

When I edit a document that struggles to not use second person, I start by adding back in the subjects that are missing. For example, in the subheading to this post I wrote, "One should avoid using one's easy way out." To fix this, I first have to look at the context of this sentence and that of the overall article to understand whom "one" is referring to, in this case it is most likely writers and copyeditors. If I am in doubt, this is a case where I always check with the author through an author's note. The corrected sentence would look like "Writers should avoid using their easy way out."

When there are an unknown number of subjects in play, it can be more difficult to decipher what the underlying subjects are. Though more challenging, these cases are even more important to fix than the straightforward ones, because reading comprehension can also become challenging. In his 1893 play A Woman of No Importance, Oscar Wilde wrote, "One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry." Are there one or two missing subjects? The answer could drastically change the meaning. Does he mean, "[Married couples] should always be in love. That is the reason [Walt Whitman] should never marry." This quote is often used without any context, and, when it is, there is no way of knowing if this proposed correction is incorrect. In cases where there are an unknown number of underlying subjects, I always write an authors note.

As a second approach to fixing vague correction to second person, I like to restructure the sentence. For sentences that the author found very difficult to get into third person, the best solution is to use a different sentence structure altogether, one that will refocus the sentence so that "one" no longer is necessary. Often when sentences are rewritten from second person, they are in passive voice, which can be effective but rarely is.

Take a look at the following example, "When working from home, one may be tempted to wear pajamas during meetings." I could just replace the one with a subject, but that would change the intended meaning. If kept in the passive voice, the topic of this sentence is the "worker" or "student" that is experiencing temptation. However, the topic of an article containing this sentence is more likely to be video meetings. The more appropriate solution would be "When working from home, video meetings make pajamas a tempting clothing option." By restructuring problematic sentences into active voice, writing becomes more clear, and further modifiers become more natural.

You may or may not have noticed that I did not use it in this article. If you did, I hope you also noticed that I left no subjects ambiguous through the use of "one". Second person isn't always bad. When used with intention and in the correct contexts, you can feel free to use as much second person as you please. To wield language effectively is to write with every tool in your belt.