Jeremy Gordon examines the reliance on the collective pronoun in making an argument:
Over time, the “royal we” has made its way from the mouths of Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher into our writing. At best, it seems a crutch, while at worst it’s an assumed arrogance. Here’s but one example from The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones, writing a jeremiad against Jay-Z:
However thick the darkness, we drag ourselves into arguments, up to lecterns, because we have not let go of each other yet. We still think we can fix a thing that shows no sign of ever being fixed.
… [I]t’s clear this isn’t a literal case of the royal “we.” (It’s hard to imagine any music writer being that arrogant.) Instead, it’s a rhetorical trick to make the reader say “I guess I do drag myself into the argument despite the thickness of the darkness!” Because with his “we,” who is Frere-Jones speaking for?
Himself, trying to avoid the English class no-no of using first person? The New Yorker, with the “we” a formal endorsement of what’s being discussed? Is it even more far-reaching than that, leaping off the screen to presume how the reader is supposed to feel? Without some kind of clarification, there’s really no way to know.
Writing in Personal Pronouns in English Language, English professor Katie Wales notes the irony: “‘We’ itself is often used, out of modesty, for example, to resist the egocentricity of a potential ‘I’; yet an egocentric ‘meaning’ will often be re-asserted.” In hiding the individual author, a consensus opinion is born. No one person thinks this thing; we do. And because the entire reason of why you’re reading is because you think the writer has something to say, you’re subconsciously agreeing before you’ve even thought otherwise.
