Short answer: Why on earth shouldn’t you?
Long answer:
Some of you may remember in-class discussions about the English progressive construction, where I argued, in a nutshell, that it is silly to assume that you can teach people when to use progressives and when not to based on so-called triggers like yesterday or usually or the type of verb. She was loving every minute of it is perfect English. What you need to do is ask yourself what the function of the progressive construction is, describe it accurately, and then teach learners the form along with its function(s). In language teaching, mechanistic shortcuts that ignore function just do not work in the long run, and they don’t really make anyone’s life easier, whatever people’s hopes may be.
The same applies to passives and the pronoun I. Don’t ask whether you are allowed to use passives in this or that genre with this or that lecturer, ask instead what a passive construction does and whether you want it. Don’t ask whether a specific pronoun is banned or not, think about its functions. Apparently, there are people who teach students that I should be avoided in general, but this is one of those mechanistic shortcuts that does not, in the end, teach people the real point. In a sentence like (1), I is perfectly fine; in fact, anything else (e.g. a passive) would be misleading, since it is vital to know that it is the author’s practice that is being described, not general practice. What we don’t want, and this is probably what people mean when they say “don’t use I”, is information as in (2), which is irrelevant to an academic readership.
- I use the term indirect object to refer to the second non-PP verbal argument in linear order, in opposition to oblique object, by which I mean an object in the shape of a prepositional phrase. (constructed example, based on a true story 🙂 )
- I decided to write this paper on Indian English because, when I was five years old, my parents and I spent three years in… (from a term paper, adapted)
(This takes us to another misconception. When essay writing coaches say that it is a good idea to state why you find a specific topic interesting, what they mean (I hope) is that it can’t hurt to explain the significance of your findings or conclusions to the linguistic community. What they hopefully didn’t mean to suggest is that your lecturer wants to read about how you personally came to study English. No offence, but you yourself are just not relevant. 🙂 Nor do you have space to waste.)
Back on topic. What is the function of passive constructions? Passive constructions topicalise the patient by omitting the agent or introducing them later in the clause, in which case the agent is in focus. There can be various reasons for wanting to do this. In (3) below, a scientific concept is introduced by a reference to a seminal paper. Mentioning the subject matter first and the author at the end of the clause makes it possible to link the clause to the previous discourse (this is about case grammar) and to what follows (the author is taken up as the topic of the ensuing relative clause). Passive constructions like the one in (4) should indeed be avoided, because they are ambiguous with respect to who the agent is (in this case, whether the author is using the OED’s semantic categories or her own).
- Case grammar is a linguistic theory that stresses the importance of semantic roles in an effort to make explicit the basic meaning relationships in a sentence. Case grammar was developed in the 1960s by American linguist Charles J. Fillmore, who viewed it as a “substantive modification to the theory of transformational grammar” (“The Case for Case,” 1968). (Nordquist, Richard. 2016. “case grammar”. https://www.thoughtco.com/case-grammar-linguistic-theory-1689744, accessed 26 June 2017)
- The words are categorized semantically. (from a term paper, adapted)
So, long story short: Please decide for yourselves.