ACADEMIC WRITING: THE ROLE OF FIRST PERSON PRONOUNS IN READER-WRITER RELATIONSHIP

This article describes the significance of the development of an appropriate relationship between writers and their readers “as the demonstration of absolute truth, empirical evidence, or flawless logic” (Hyland, 2001). According to a number of studies, in order to create an academically convincing identity, writers use a variety of devices in their discourse such as self-mention, hedges and boosters, evaluative commentary, interpersonal meta-discourse, theme selections and stance markers. One of the ways to maintain reader-writer interaction is referring to readers as the participants of the discourse by using inclusive or second person pronouns, interjections, questions, directives and references to shared knowledge. According to Hyland (2001), the usage of inclusive pronouns in the 240 research articles investigated by him comprises 36.5 % of the total features leaving behind imperatives, obligation modal verbs, indefinite pronouns, knowledge references, rhetorical questions, second person pronouns, asides, real questions, and the structure “it is (adjective) to do”. First person pronoun weperforms a number of important functions in academic prose, for example, it can help the writer to engage readers in academic discourse, address the reader “from a position of confidence”, guide readers “through an argument”, and structure the information within a written text. Nevertheless, first person exclusive pronoun I rather than inclusive we would be more appropriate in some cases in order to leave an opportunity to the readers to decide whether or not they agree with the view. Hence, it is crucial to choose a pronoun with the appropriate function in each particular case.

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