Personalism results from a story-line narration rather than a thematic-focused description. This story-line narration is focused on agents as sentence (or clause) subjects and their actions as verbs, rather than themes represented by noun subjects and the verb to be linked to a subject complement.

Personalism in a journal article may be reader friendly; however, personalism is distracting because it deviates from expected professional formality.

Examples of first person personalism are arranged according to section of a journal article and conceptual component: 1. Introduction; 2. Materials and Methods; 3. Results; 4. Discussion.