Options of identity in academic

writing
Ken Hyland

Students often see academic writing as an alien form of literacy designed to

disguise the author and deal directly with facts. Style guides and textbooks
commonly portray scholarly writing as a kind of impersonal, faceless discourse,
and EAP teachers direct students to remove themselves from their texts. But
how realistic is this advice? In this article I briey explore the most visible
expression of a writers presence in a text: the use of exclusive rst person
pronouns. I show that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of
impersonality, and that in fact there is considerable scope for the negotiation of
identity in academic writing. I argue that by treating academic discourse as
uniformly impersonal we actually do a disservice to our students, and that as
teachers, we might better assist them by raising their awareness of the options
available to them as writers.

Writer identity and

the myth of
impersonality

Students often approach university writing assignments with the idea

that academic prose is dry and impersonal. They have been taught that
this kind of writing involves an objective exploration of ideas that
transcends the individual. They must leave their personalities at the
door, and subordinate their views, actions, and personality to its rigid
conventions of anonymity. This advice is easily found in numerous
textbooks and style guides for both L1 and L2 writers:
The total paper is considered to be the work of the writer. You dont
have to say I think or My opinion is in the paper. () Traditional
formal writing does not use I or we in the body of the paper.
(Spencer and Arbon 1996: 26)
To the scientist it is unimportant who observed the chemical reaction:
only the observation itself is vital. Thus the active voice sentence is
inappropriate. In this situation, passive voice and the omission of the
agent of action are justied.
(Gong and Dragga 1995)
In general, academic writing aims at being objective in its expression
of ideas, and thus tries to avoid specic reference to personal
opinions. Your academic writing should imitate this style by
eliminating rst person pronouns as far as possible.
(Arnaudet and Barrett 1984: 73)

ELT Journal Volume 56/4 October 2002 Oxford University Press

351

Write your paper with a third person voice that avoids I believe or It
is my opinion.
(Lester 1993: 144)
This view, however, oversimplies a more complex picture. Recent
research has emphasized that disciplines have dierent views of
knowledge, dierent research practices, and dierent ways of seeing the
world, and that these dierence are reected in diverse forms of
argument and expression (Hyland 2000; Johns 1997). Essentially,
academic writing is not a single undierentiated mass, but a variety of
subject-specic literacies. Through these literacies members of
disciplines communicate with their peers, and students with their
professors. The words they choose must present their ideas in ways that
make most sense to their readers, and part of this involves adopting an
appropriate identity. It is true that almost everything we write says
something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set up
with our readers. Most obviously, however, a writers identity is created
by, and revealed through, the use or absence of the I pronoun.
The process of learning to write at university often involves the process of
creating a new identity (Fan Shen 1988) which ts the expectations of the
subject teachers who represent a students new discipline. The authors
explicit appearance in a text, or its absence, works to create a plausible
academic identity, and a voice with which to present an argument.
Creating such an identity, however, is generally very dicult for secondlanguage students. This is partly because these identities can dier
considerably from those they are familiar with from their everyday lives,
or previous learning experiences (Cadman 1997), but also because
students are rarely taught that disciplinary conventions dier (Lea and
Street 1999). In short, if we simply assume that academic writing is
universally impersonal, we disguise variability, and this may have the
eect of preventing our students from coming to terms with the specic
demands of their disciplines. Instead of equipping learners with the
linguistic means to achieve their rhetorical invisibility, then, we need to
guide them towards an awareness of the options that academic writing
oers.

What expert
writers do

To see how far the textbook stereotype of impersonality corresponds with

actual practice, I interviewed expert writers and examined 240 published
journal articles, 30 from each of eight disciplines. Using Wordpilot 2000
(Milton 1999), a text analysis and concordance programme, I
electronically searched the corpus for the pronouns I, me, my, we, us, and
our, and then examined each case to ensure it was an exclusive rst
person use, i.e. that it referred only to the writer(s) and was therefore a
genuine author pronoun. My results suggest that academic writing is not
the uniformly faceless prose it is often thought to be, but displays
considerable dierences between disciplines (Table 1). Broadly, writers
in the hard sciences and engineering prefer to downplay their personal
role to highlight the issue under study, while a stronger identity is
claimed in the humanities and social sciences papers.

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Ken Hyland

Discipline

table 1
Average frequency of
writer pronouns per
research paper

All writer pronouns Singular (I, Me, My) Plural (We, Us, Our)

Marketing
Philosophy
App. Ling.
Sociology
Physics
Biology
Electronic Eng.
Mechanical Eng.

38.2
34.5
32.3
29.4
17.7
15.5
11.6
2.6

1.6
33.0
17.2
11.7
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0

36.5
1.5
15.0
17.7
17.7
15.5
11.6
2.6

Overall

22.7

7.9

14.8

The preference for joint authorship in the sciences and engineering

explains the greater use of plural forms in those disciplines, but 75% of
all the author pronouns in the corpus occurred in the humanities and
social sciences. Decisions to employ a writer pronoun here are related to
the fact that arguments in such soft knowledge domains are less
precisely measurable and clear-cut than in the hard sciences, and the
extent to which a personal stance can help promote an impression of
condence and authority. Authors make a personal standing in their
texts to establish a credible scholarly identity, and to underline what they
have to say (Ivanic 1997). For this reason, we most commonly nd that
writers use the rst person when they are presenting their claims and
bottom-line results, and intrude into the text to clearly link themselves
with their main contribution. By using fewer author pronouns, on the
other hand, writers in the sciences adopt a less personal style to help
strengthen an impression of objectivity by subordinating their own voice
to that of their results.

What L2 writers do

In contrast to these expert uses, my experiences with Hong Kong

students suggested that they tended to either underuse writer pronouns
or use them unadventurously, referring to their texts rather than their
ideas. I therefore conducted a similar study, looking at 48 project reports
written by nal-year Hong Kong undergraduates in six elds
(Management, Economics, Biology, Information Systems,
Manufacturing Engineering, and TESOL). I also interviewed students
and their subject supervisors. While I was unable to match the
disciplines exactly, the two corpora are close enough to reveal dierences
in writer uses. Overall, there were only 12 author pronouns per essay in
the student corpus, compared with 22 in the published texts, and the
disciplinary variations were largely absent. Table 2 gives a broad idea of
these dierences, and shows that when adjusted for word length, the
expert writers were three times more likely to use author pronouns in
their texts, and this ratio held across both hard and soft disciplines.
These results are all the more interesting because second-language
speakers often nd it easier to construct active sentences, with the agent
in subject position, which means that these writers went to some
linguistic trouble to avoid author pronouns. The interviews suggested
there were two main reasons for this avoidance. First, many students
believed that I and we were inappropriate in academic writing, having
been taught not to bring their own opinions into their texts. In addition,
Identity in academic writing

353

Field

table 2
Personal reference in
research articles and
essays (per 10,000
words)

Totals

Singular Pronouns

Plural pronouns

Articles L2 Essays

Articles L2 Essays

Articles L2 Essays

Science &
Engineering

30.7

11.7

0.1

7.7

30.6

4.0

Business &
professional

46.9

16.1

22.2

9.2

24.7

6.8

Overall

41.2

14.4

14.4

8.6

26.8

5.8

however, there also seem to be cultural reasons for preferring the

passive. Many respondents said that they felt uncomfortable with the
personal authority that the use of I implied. First-person pronouns are a
powerful way of projecting a strong writer identity, and this
individualistic kind of stance seems to clash with beliefs and practices
that value more collectivist forms of self-representation.
These students, therefore, were sensitive to the rhetorical eects of using
the rst person, expressing a reluctance to accept its clear connotations of
subjectivity, authority, and personal commitment. This sensitivity led
them not only to avoid these forms, but also to restrict their use to lowstakes functions. Whereas the expert writers used authorial pronouns to
underline the personal source of their contributions, in these student
essays they mainly occurred when writers acknowledged assistance,
stated their purposes, or explained procedures. Over 75% of all uses
performed these relatively innocuous and text internal roles, which
commit the writer to little, and carry only a very weak sense of identity.
More key argumentative functions, such as presenting and justifying
claims, were usually expressed without direct reference to the author.
Decisions concerning whether to adopt an impersonal style, or to
represent oneself explicitly, can have an important impact on how a
message is received. Many of the students subject teachers, particularly
in the soft disciplines, commented on the absence of any real voice or
presence behind the papers they marked, and expressed frustration at
students general reluctance to commit themselves. So, by avoiding the
use of author pronouns, and failing to stand behind their interpretations,
these emerging writers run the risk of not establishing an eective
authorial identity, and of failing to create a successful academic
argument.

Creating learner
awareness

The extent to which authors can explicitly intrude into their texts and
mark their personal involvement by using rst person pronouns, clearly
varies between disciplines. This means that we cannot, as teachers, assist
learners to write eectively by oering them blanket assertions that
academic texts are impersonal, and by admonishing them to avoid
authorial pronouns. While this kind of advice might be useful in
reducing the overuse of I when introducing academic writing, it is more
helpful if students are able to see where I can be used appropriately and
eectively. So, instead of allowing them to assume that academic
discourse conventions are self-evidently impersonal, we need to lead
students towards an understanding that there is no single set of rules or

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Ken Hyland

practices we can apply to writing in all elds, and that an explicit writer
presence is often an eective rhetorical option.
Obviously, these ideas may seem heretical to some learners, as they very
probably contradict hard-learnt and solid beliefs about the nature of
academic prose. An eective response to this view must therefore involve
(1) encouraging students to reect on their own preferences and
behaviours, and (2) helping them to develop a sensitivity to how language
is actually used in particular target contexts.

1 Analysing selfpractices

In building this kind of rhetorical consciousness, I have found it useful

to raise students awareness of what they do themselves, and to critically
evaluate their practices. One way of accomplishing this is to ask learners
to mark all instances of I in one of their essays with a highlighter, and
note all the main verbs associated with them. Students can then see the
rhetorical function that the pronoun is used to realize. They may nd that
these functions frequently include the following (examples from my
corpus):
explaining what was done (I have interviewed ten teachers from six
schools).
structuring the discourse (First, I will discuss the method, then present
my results.)
showing a result (My ndings show that the animation distracted the
pupils from the test.)
making a claim (I think two factors are particularly signicant in
destroying the councils.)
Building on this, more advanced students might be helped to see the
kind of writer role that these pronoun choices suggest, and the relative
authority that the writer claims in employing them. So, for instance, the
use of I to guide the reader through the text projects a relatively less
authoritative role than its use to recount the research process, or to
express an opinion. With this understanding, students can then
construct a simple histogram to show how they most often used the rst
person. Alternatively, points could be allocated to particular uses, say 5,
where I is used to present a claim, 4 where it expresses a view, 3 where
it stands behind a result, and so on. The higher the number, the stronger
the writers presence. In this way student writers can draw up their own
authorial prole, see better where they may be underselling
themselves, and be led to where they can most eectively claim authority
as the source of ideas.
Another useful way to help students become aware of their often
unconscious practices and beliefs is to give them, or ask them to design
themselves, a number of talking points on the use of the rst person.
The kinds of questions that often generate a lot of group discussion focus
on their own use of I, their impressions of seeing it in the work of others,
the practices of dierent elds or rst language, and alternative ways of
conveying the same idea:
Do you use I or my in your academic writing?
Do you feel comfortable using these words?
Identity in academic writing

355

 Do you try to avoid them? How would you express the same idea instead?
Do you notice when experts use this in your eld? What do you think
about this?
Why do you think some writers use I and others dont?
Why do you think some writers use I in one part of their paper and not in
others?
Do writers typically use or avoid I in your rst language?

2 Analysing expert
practices

In addition to seeing how they use language themselves, students

obviously need to be aware of the features to be found in expert texts, and
the conventions and expectations which may exist in their own
disciplinary communities. This kind of consciousness raising can be
assisted in various ways. Subject teachers, for instance, can be an
excellent source of data, as they are usually willing to be interviewed by
students on their own practices and their impressions of the conventions
in their elds. Alternatively, students can critique the guidelines
commonly oered in university writing textbooks and style guides and
compare them with the information in Table 1 or with expert texts. By
questioning the authority of these prescriptions, they gain the condence
to trust their own perceptions of what conventions are employed in their
elds.
Most centrally, however, rhetorical consciousness-raising should involve
some kind of focus on texts, and this can be achieved by asking students
to conduct mini-analyses of features in the genres they have to write.
This need not be an elaborate exercise, as even a simple task can
encourage learners to examine texts for writer presence. Most simply, the
self-awareness activity suggested above can be transferred to the target
genre:
Take a photocopy of what you consider to be a typical paper from your
discipline, and with a highlighter, mark all occurrences of I that you nd.
Count and tabulate your ndings.
How does your eld compare to the results in Table 1?
What explanations for any dierences occur to you?
What verbs occur most often with I in this text? Can you group them in
any way?
Select ve places where I can be replaced with a passive. What eect does
this have on the meaning of the sentence?
This kind of contrastive reection is useful for showing certain practices
as specic to particular groups, and for identifying how little language
use is actually universal.
A useful tool in this context is a concordance programme such as
WordPilot 2000 (Milton 1999), mentioned earlier, WordSmith Tools
(Scott 1996), or Monoconc Pro (Barlow 1996). Basically, these allow the
user to search large amounts of computer-readable text (a corpus) for
particular words and combinations. In addition to frequency counts of a
feature, these programmes also give a KWIC (key word in context)
concordance which displays every occurrence of the search word,
together with its surrounding co-text. Such a list enables the student to
look for patterns of use. Essentially then, the machine removes the

356

Ken Hyland

drudgery of isolating, sorting, and counting the target feature, and allows
students to see how I functions in context across a range of texts:
observing its most frequent senses and the company it typically keeps.
The teacher here simply guides and co-ordinates the student as he or she
researches the language in a data-driven, inductive, consciousnessraising exploration of texts. With teacher encouragement, this process
can both stimulate students curiosity and encourage them to actively
and independently engage with the language.
I should stress that the purpose of these tasks is not to turn our students
into linguists, but to direct their attention to features of writing in their
disciplines, focusing perhaps for the rst time, on the language used,
rather than the content. These typical patterns, of course, only provide
broad boundaries to the options available to writers, but learners need to
be aware of the extent of these options, and of their eects. Such a genrebased approach, with a strong focus on rhetorical consciousness-raising,
can reveal to students that a writers decision whether or not to use that I
can be a central way of establishing a relationship with readers, and of
constructing what will be seen as an eective argument. It is also worth
noting here that in this process our role as teachers cannot be as a source
of knowledge, but as intermediaries between learners and the language
of their disciplines (Johns 1997), using our expertise in ways which will
help students to apply their own.
Perhaps equally importantly, these kinds of tasks help learners to see that
there is no single academic literacy but a variety of practices relevant to,
and appropriate for, particular disciplines and purposes. It is important
for students to be aware of this variation, not only because it will make
them better writers, but also because it will help them see that learning to
write at university is not a process of xing up language weaknesses,
but of coming to use discipline specic conventions appropriately.

Conclusion

Eective academic writing depends on appropriate language choices, but

we often tend to focus our teaching on those options that aect
meaning rather than those that give an impression of the writer. The
problems of language prociency always seem to be more urgent, and we
concentrate our eorts on helping students manage the presentation of
their information before managing their presentation of themselves. But
increasingly we are learning that such interpersonal aspects of writing
are not simply an optional extra to be brushed up when students have
gained control of summarizing, synthesizing, handling citations, and so
on; they are central to academic argument, and to university success. We
have, then, an important consciousness-raising role in helping students
to develop their awareness of the eects of self-mention, and enabling
them to recognize both the choices available to them and their impact.
With this understanding, our learners will be better able to gain control
over their writing, and meet the considerable challenges of academic
writing in a second language.
Final version received May 2001

Identity in academic writing

357

Notes
1 Wordpilot 2000 is available for trial use from the
developers web site
(www.compulang.com/wordpilot)
2 WordSmith Tools information at
www.liv.ac.uk/~ms2928/wordsmith/
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Lea, M. and B. Street. 1999. Writing as academic

literacies: understanding textual practices in
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(eds.) 1999: Writing: texts, processes, and practices.
Harlow: Longman.
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The author
Ken Hyland is an Associate Professor at The City
University of Hong Kong. He has taught in Sudan,
Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Papua New Guinea, New
Zealand, and the UK. His articles on language
teaching and academic discourse have appeared in
several international journals. Recent publications
include Hedging in Scientic Research Articles
(Benjamins 1998), Disciplinary Discourses
(Longman 2000), and Writing: texts, processes, and
practices, edited with Chris Candlin (Longman
1999).
Email: Ken.hyland@cityu.edu.hk