Native and non-native writers’ use of first person pronouns in the different sections of biology research articles in English

Abstract

Various authors have shown the first person to play a key role in the construction of the writer's persona in research articles. This paper compares the use of first person in a corpus of biology articles produced by native English-speaking (NES) writers and a corpus of research article manuscripts produced by non-native English-speaking (NNES) writers, focusing on first person distribution and function in the different sections. The results revealed under-use, overuse, and phraseological problems in the NNES corpus. The first person occurred in all the sections of both corpora, with significant differences of use across the sections. The most notable differences occurred in the Results section, where NES writers used first person mainly to show that they assumed responsibility for the methodological decisions that led to the results obtained. This study stresses the need to raise NNES writers’ awareness of NES's use of first person in articles written in English, and to make them notice differences of use in the sections. Such instruction is expected to empower NNES writers by providing information that will allow them to make informed decisions.