Personal Pronoun Use in Community-College
Student Writing: Developing an Academic Self
Olga D. Lambert
Benedictine University
Lisle, IL
CCCC 2014: Indianapolis
Personal Pronoun Use in Speech
and Writing


Frequent use of personal pronouns is an
important feature of spoken discourse (Biber,
1988). In contrast, personal pronouns are
rarely used in academic prose.
In written discourse, personal pronoun use is
perceived by readers as a marker of a less
formal tone and a closer reader-writer distance
(Thayer et al., 2010).
Corpus-Based Studies of Personal
Pronoun Use in Academic Writing




Most studies done on corpora of high-level
academic writing
Hyland (2001): 240 published articles in 8
disciplines
Hyland (2002): 64 Hong Kong undergraduate
theses by L2 writers
Harwood (2005): Qualitative analysis of 40
articles across 4 disciplines
First Person Pronoun Use in
Academic Writing: Author's
Presence and Competence


Hyland (2001) and Harwood (2005) found that
authors of published academic articles use first
person pronouns to establish credibility and
membership in a disciplinary community.
In 2002, Hyland found that L2 undergraduate
thesis writers underuse first person pronouns
compared to the authors of the published
articles in the 2001 study.
Personal Pronouns in Student
Writing: A Gap in the Literature



Novice academic writers need to:

Negotiate the spoken-written discourse
continuum

Establish an appropriate academic self
Breeze (2007) examined a small sample of
undergraduate student essays and reports

Overuse of I and you in essays

Use of we in reports shows awareness of different
academic genres and audiences
More corpus-based studies of novice academic
writing are needed
The Present Study:
Research Questions



Does novice academic writers' use of first and
second person pronouns mirror spoken
discourse or the conventions of academic
prose?
Are there differences in the use of first and
second person pronouns? In the use of
singular (I, me, my) and plural (we, our) first
person pronouns?
Have the patterns of personal pronoun use in
student writing changed over time?
The Present Study:
Research Questions



Does novice academic writers' use of first and
second person pronouns mirror spoken
discourse or the conventions of academic
prose?
Are there differences in the use of first and
second person pronouns? In the use of
singular (I, me, my) and plural (we, our) first
person pronouns?
Have the patterns of personal pronoun use in
student writing changed over time?
Corpus and Method



Summaries and reviews of “Into the Electronic
Millenium,” a chapter of Sven Birkerts's The
Gutenberg Elegies, written by first-semester
community college students between 1999 and
2013: the Gutenberg Elegies Corpus (GEC)
Roughly 140,000 words
The frequencies of I, me, my, mine, we, us, our,
ours, you, your, and yours calculated in 19992000, 2003-2005, and 2012-2013 samples and
standardized to occurrences/1,000 words (see
Biber, 1988)
Working Hypotheses



Students' use of personal pronouns will be
closer to spoken language than to academic
writing
Students' use of I will increase over time while
the use of we will decrease (a shift to greater
orality)
“My sense is that there's a generational
difference. I think the younger folk coming in
now are more inclined to use the passive voice
and I than they are to use we” (quoted in
Harwood, 2006, p. 443)
Personal Pronoun Use:
A Comparison of Biber's Data and
the GEC
70
60
57.9
50
40
30.84
30
29.4
23.15
20
10
5.7
0
Biber AP
Biber F-to-F
2003-2005
1999-2000
2012-2013
First Person Pronouns: I, me,
my,mine, we, us, our, ours
Second Person Pronouns: you,
your, yours
Personal Pronoun Use:
A Comparison of Biber's Data and
the GEC



The use of personal pronouns in the GEC
represents a transitional stage between spoken
discourse and formal academic prose
Frequencies of second person pronoun use are
much closer to academic writing than spoken
language
No evidence of a shift toward greater orality
over time
First Person Pronouns in the GEC:
Singular vs. Plural
25
20.81
19.04
20
Singular
10
Plural
14.38
15
10.36
10.03
8.77
5
0
1999-2000
2003-2005
2012-2013
First Person Pronouns in the GEC:
Singular vs. Plural




In contrast to Breeze (2007), we is used much
more often than I
Students are aware of some of the differences
between academic and personal writing, and
are attempting to imitate familiar genres of
academic writing (i.e. textbooks)
Students are beginning to develop their
academic selves
The changes in we need to be investigated
further
We, Us, Our, Ours:
Changes Over Time



Chi-square tests showed a statistically
significant decrease in the use of plural first
person pronouns between 1999-2000 and 20032005, then an increase between 2003-2005 and
2012-2013
1999-2000 vs. 2003-2005:
χ2(df = 1) = 6.21 (p = 0.01)
2003-2005 vs. 2012-2013:
χ2(df = 1) = 3.63 (p = 0.06)
Example 1: 1999
In his opinion, we have lost our individuality by
becoming an electronic media society. We are
following the masses that stare at a computer
screen for long periods of time, isolated from all
others. As a whole, according to Birkerts, we are
no longer each individual person reading a well
written book, but instead, a group of computer
addicted fools. We have allowed the new way of
learning push us away from the basic learning
process and guide us toward the more
electronic approach.
Example 2: 2005
Sven Birkert goes on to quote Historian Eric
Havelock in saying "The basic shift from oral to
literate cultures was a slow process". Which is true,
but our methods of message transportation is much
faster than that of the days of ancient Greece. In the
every day modern world the faster and more
efficiently you work and communicate the better off
you will be. But are there limits on technology?
Now a person can sit his/her bedroom to look up
information for work or school instead of spending a
day at the library. Heck you can even get a degree
in the privacy of your own home and at your own
pace.
Example 3: 2013
Into the Electric Millennium by Sven Birkerts really
pinpoints the fade of the written word in today's society
and how mass media is influencing that loss. With
technology developing farther every single day, more
and more aspects of our life are being made "easier"
with technology, and more and more aspects of our life
are being taken over by technology as it progresses
into the future. One thing he really focuses on is how
we aren't improving the process of things, but rather
just finding different ways about going about them. He
really feels that mass media is to blame for the radical
decay of the written word.
References
Biber, D. (1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge NY: Cambridge University Press.
Breeze, R. (2007). How personal is this text? Researching writer and reader presence in student writing
using WordSmith tools. CORELL: Computer Resources for Language Learning, 1, 14-21.
Harwood, N. (2005). “Nowhere has anyone attempted . . . In this article I do just that”: A corpus-based
study of self-promotional I and we in academic writing across four disciplines. Journal of
Pragmatics, 37, 1027-1031.
Harwood, N. (2006). (In)appropriate personal pronoun use in political science. A qualitative study and
a proposed heuristic for future research. Written Communication, 23(4), 424-450.
Hyland, K. (2001). Humble servants of the discipline? Self-mention in research articles. English for
Specific Purposes, 20, 207-226.
Hyland, K. (2002). Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of
1091-1112.
Pragmatics, 34,
Thayer, A., Evans, M.B., McBride, A.A., Queen, M., & Spyridakis, J.H. (2010). I, pronoun: A study of
formality in online content. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 40(4), 447-458.