Abstract
Though writing style manuals published some decades ago urged the avoidance of personal pronouns in academic texts (e.g., Devlin, 1910; Herbert, 1965), recent research has argued that personal pronouns can serve to build a relationship between the author and the readers, projecting “authorial presence” in the text. The use of pronouns can thus play an important role in convincing readers of the author’s point of view (Hyland, 2005). This study examined the self-mentions (“author” and the first/third-person pronouns) in 100 dissertation abstracts written by Japanese graduate students in engineering. The analysis showed that Japanese students used 1) self-mentions, especially the first-person pronouns, 40% less often, 2) indirect self-mentions (“author” and the third-person pronouns) about 10 times more often than their counterparts in America, and 3) they used the first-person pronouns with particular verbs mainly to describe the purpose and method of the study.
