Authority and invisibility

Journal of Pragmatics, 2002

Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational 'content', it is also about the representation of self. Recent research has suggested that academic prose is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of such an authorial identity is the use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners. But while the use of these forms are a powerful rhetorical strategy for emphasising a contribution, many second language writers feel uncomfortable using them because of their connotations of authority. In this paper I explore the notion of identity in L2 writing by examining the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses, comparisons with a large corpus of research articles, and interviews with students and their supervisors. The study shows significant underuse of authorial reference by students and clear preferences for avoiding these forms in contexts which involved making arguments or claims. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of I may be problematic for many L2 writers. #

2020

In this paper, we attempt to examine the identity of researchers in writing their research articles (RAs) by exploring the linguistic forms indicating the identity of the authors in English RAs, determining the functions these forms serve in the discourse, and revealing the socio-cultural aspects implied from the use of the authorial identity. We will identify the English first-person pronouns used by native and non-native authors in Scopus-indexed linguistics and education academic journal articles. This study applied the corpus linguistic method to collect the data and to draw conclusions about the authorial identity presented in the articles. Hopefully, this paper will help to not only comprehend the role and the importance of the authorial presence but also encourage researchers to represent their identity in their own RAs.

Elt Journal, 2002

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts. Style guides and textbooks commonly portray scholarly writing as a kind of impersonal, faceless discourse and EAP teachers direct students to remove themselves from their texts. But how realistic is this advice? In this article I briefly explore the most visible expression of a writer's presence in a text: the use of exclusive first person pronouns. I show that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of impersonality and that there is actually considerable scope for the negotiation of identity in academic writing. I argue that by treating academic discourse as uniformly impersonal we actually do a disservice to our students and, as teachers, we might better assist them by raising their awareness of the options available to them as writers.

2013

This article describes a study of how students use first person pronouns in papers written for undergraduate courses in multiple disciplines. If prompted, students imitate some of the ways experts use first person to establish their authority; but just as often students use first person pronouns to express uncertainty or to reveal that they have less status than their audience. I argue that we can help students more closely approximate expert practices by making them aware of how experts use first person and by providing them with opportunities to use first person in those same ways. One of the most obvious ways writers insert themselves into texts is through first person pronouns. The functions these pronouns serve in academic writing range from low risk purposes, such as announcing topics or describing research methods, to high risk purposes, such as making original claims. Some high risk functions of first person are illustrated in the following passage from the introduction of a...

ELT Journal , 2002

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to disguise the au-thor and deal directly with facts. Style guides and textbooks commonly portray scholarly writing as a kind of impersonal, faceless discourse and EAP teachers direct students to re-move themselves from their texts. But how realistic is this advice? In this article I briefly ex-plore the most visible expression of a writer’s presence in a text: the use of exclusive first person pronouns. I show that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of impersonality and that there is actually considerable scope for the negotiation of identity in academic writ-ing. I argue that by treating academic discourse as uniformly impersonal we actually do a dis-service to our students and, as teachers, we might better assist them by raising their awareness of the options available to them as writers.

2011

The issue of authorial stance has been the topic of much research. A rather obvious way to claim authorial presence is to use first person reference and the corresponding determiners. However, not only is the I emerging from the text plural, but different genres are associated with differing degrees of I-ism, and these conventions vary from culture to culture. In this paper I explore the issue of authorial stance in connection with identity by focusing on the use of the first person pronouns and their respective determiners in the academic writing of Italian students of English. The study shows that referential, vague and impersonal uses of personal pronouns are intertwined in a complex way and create shades of impersonality in a heteroglossic space in which a reconstruction of the self takes place.

2020

n a quest to improve their writing proficiency, second language (L2) learners are often advised by English language teachers to establish a voice in academic writing. The need for writers to establish a voice in academic writing is a long-standing idea that is backed by the assertion that a strong voice indicates advanced writing proficiency. This idea has necessitated several studies on the role of voice in L2 writing. Sperling and Appleman (2011) reveal that the existent literature on voice research broadly defines this concept as referring to “authors, writing styles, authorship, language registers, rhetorical stance, written and spoken prosody, the self in the text, and scores of others” (p. 70). They however find this broad definition to be problematic and emphasize the need for a voice to be clearly defined. Therefore, Authorial Presence in English Academic Texts aims to fill the gap by defining the concept of authorial voice and how it is realized among L2 learners across dif...

Metadiscourse in Written Genres: Uncovering Textual and Interactional Aspects of Texts, 2017

The writers of any scientific community are inherently expected to fulfil some agreed-upon discourse conventions of the academic discourse community (Molino, 2010) in the sense of creating a successful dialogic interaction through their texts. In line with this, Akbas (2014b) raised the question of “how and to what to extent writers foreground their explicit manifestations or hide their personal projections with impersonal forms’’ (p. 56). Considering the fact that academic writing is closely linked to the representation of authorial self (Hyland, 2002) and the voice of the postgraduates has received relatively less attention, in this paper, we explored the notion of explicit (via I and we-based instances) and implicit (via passive and impersonal instances) representation of postgraduates as the novice writers in the Social Sciences; namely, Turkish native speakers, Turkish speakers of English and English native speakers. Therefore, the focus of the paper shall be on the variations of personal (first person pronouns) or impersonal (agentless passives and inanimate subjects) uses of authorial references as well as their discourse functions in the postgraduate writing. In total, 90 successfully-completed dissertations of three postgraduate groups were randomly selected to compile the corpus of the study, and a corpus-informed discourse analysis approach was applied in the identification of choices of authorial representation in this genre. Following an extensive manual analysis of the texts from the corpus for each group, a list of explicit and implicit authorial references was extracted from sample texts to be explored in the analysis of the whole corpus. As was applied by Fløttum (2012), during the identification of authorial references, all verbs collocating with the explicit or implicit authorial references were examined carefully to see if the references performed author visibility in the texts. The quantitative analysis clearly showed that Turkish L1 and Turkish writers of English preferred to build mainly an impersonal impression over what they were presenting to the reader by employing a greater number of implicit authorial references whereas English L1 writers chose to create a more self-prominent academic prose. The qualitative analysis provided some evidence to argue that three groups employed explicit or implicit authorial references to accomplish particular discourse acts (i.e. guiding readers through the texts, elaborating an argument & making a claim, restating data collection, analysis and other methodological issues) strongly associated with the nature of discussion section.

L2 Journal

L2 writers likely perceive "good academic writing" as impersonal . Yet research has shown that every linguistic and rhetorical choice that a writer makesincluding, the presence/absence and different forms of self-mention-potentially reveals the writer's authorial identity . The dialogic nature of academic writing, as manifested in strategic selfmentions, has remained overshadowed in L2 writing pedagogy by other linguistic issues. This article draws attention to this gap in research: specifically, I report on the findings of a corpus-driven descriptive inquiry into authorial identity, operationalized as the use of first-person pronouns in a corpus of 126 argumentative research papers written by students enrolled in first-year L2 composition courses. The study examines how L2 writers practice self-mention, comparing the frequencies of firstperson pronouns in the argumentative corpus with both a "parent" corpus, which contains other genres produced by the same group of writers, and published research analyzed by Hyland . I also define and characterize the five qualitatively coded and quantitatively measured rhetorical functions of "I" used in the corpus (i.e., reporter, architect, narrator of personal experiences, conceder, and opinionholder). L2 writers in this study were found to use self-mention more frequently than published authors. However, L2 writers employed self-reference less frequently in their argumentative essays than for other genres. Their argumentative texts reproduced a narrative tone, as indicated by the lower ratio of the subjective/objective case of the first-person singular pronoun. A comparison of rhetorical functions reveals that nearly 50% of "I"s in the corpus function as a "narrator of personal experiences." In light of the findings, I propose pedagogical suggestions aimed at more effectively socializing college-level L2 composition students into academic discourse communities. _______________ Wang Carving out a Dialogic Space for "I"

Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer