‘We Do Not Seem to Have a Theory … The Theory I Present Here Attempts to Fill This Gap’: Inclusive and Exclusive Pronouns in Academic Writing

By Nigel Harwood. 2005

360 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecc21f4d17d037383d57bd4ec3e7039f8d81590d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Douglas Biber
2. Paul Thompson
3. A. Molino
4. Tomoyuki Kawase
5. Bethany Gray
6. Ken Hyland

In Literature and Literary Theory

1. Douglas Biber
2. Bethany Gray
3. Ken Hyland
4. A. Molino
5. Paul Thompson
6. Tomoyuki Kawase
7. Raffaella Negretti
8. Scott Andrew Crossley

Citations in the corpus

• Metadiscourse in the introductions of PhD theses and research articles (2015, methodology): “Likewise, using self-mention (we/our) to comment on previous research in the introductions has been indicated as a conventional method in academic genres (e.g., Harwood, 2005; Kuo,1999).”
• Personal and Impersonal Authorial References: A Contrastive Study of English and Italian Linguistics Research Articles. (2010, background): “First-person pronouns have been studied across different disciplinary fields (Hyland, 2001; Harwood, 2005) and in texts written by native and non-native speakers of English (Hyland, 2002; Martínez, 2005).”
• A discourse analysis of master's theses across disciplines with a focus on introductions (2008, neutral): “Research article writers have been shown to use the first person pronoun for a number of discourse functions, mainly to state the goal or purpose of the paper, to outline procedures carried out and to make a knowledge claim ( Harwood, 2005; Hyland, 2001; Kuo, 1999).”
• Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness (2010, background): “For example, researchers have noted that authors of modern academic prose sometimes refer directly to themselves (using the pronouns I and we; see Harwood, 2005) and assume the existence of a specific addressee (e.g., using imperative constructions; see Swales, Ahmad, Chang, Chavez, Dressen, &…”
• The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (2016, background): “A study by Harwood (2009) based entirely on interviews of authors from two disciplines, sociology and computer science, points to some overlap and variation in the reasons authors”