Dear Anne,
Last year I gave a talk on academic writing standards at the Asia TEFL conference in Kuching, Malaysia. After the session was over, four people came up to me and asked me the same question--is it OK to use I and we in academic writing ...and I answered that in my experience, the answer was "yes"....but the asking of the question raised my interest...and I have since been investigating this issue that has been raised in this discussion, and the answer is not clear cut. My first place to check is always the OWL site https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/15/ .When I checked the site of various universities (including Harvard), the instructions clearly said NOT to use first person.
There have been a number of articles written on the subject in addition to
Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for specific purposes, 20(3), 207-226.
I suggest checking out:
Harwood, N. (2005). 'We do not seem to have a theory...The Theory I present her attempts to fill this gap': Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in academic writing. Applied Linguistics.26(3) 343-375
And
Harwood, N. (2005). 'Nowhere has anyone attempted...In this article I aim to do just that' A corpus based study of self-promotional I and we in academic writing across disciplines. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1207-1231
And I have other sources if anyone is interested ...
I think the key is raise our students' awareness of the specific genre (or as I call it, the infra-genre) that they are writing for. It is not enough to look at grant proposals or journal articles or research reports. The students have to discover the language features of the specific target ..a grant proposal from a specific funding source...a journal article for a specific publication...within their discipline.
I will be giving a talk on this issue at the next Asia TEFl conference in Nanjing, China in November. With your permission, I will be using this discussion to introduce the controversy.
Thanks!
Susan
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From: European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing - discussions [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anne Wegner
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 4:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Use of we/I in academic texts?
Dear colleagues
Two questions for you. I teach academic writing, mainly to PhD students from difference scientific areas at various German universities. One of the things I teach is that it is generally ok to use “we/I” in academic texts, while pointing out that its use does slightly depend on the area in which one is working or the journal for which one is writing. However, my daughter said that during her recent Bachelor studies (Durham University, political sciences), she was mainly writing, and being expected to write, in the passive voice, avoiding we/I. I have two main questions related to this:
1) Am I the only one getting my workshop participants to use we/I in an English academic text? If so, I'd better stop!
2) What do academic texts in other European languages generally contain - we/I or passive voice? In a German academic text, the use of we/I is generally frowned upon.
I would appreciate any comments and am happy to put together a summary of any answers I receive.
Many thanks
Anne Wegner
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