Abstract
A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses “we” in academic writing to acknowledge one’s stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun “we” is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the literature, this study conducted a systematic corpus analysis of the use of “we” in the abstracts and conclusions of 400 articles collected from eight leading electrical and electronic (EE) engineering journals. The abstracts and conclusions were extracted to form two subcorpora, and an integrated framework was applied to analyze and seek to explain how we-clusters and we-collocations were employed. Results revealed whether authors’ use of first-person pronouns partially depends on a journal policy. The trend of using “we” showed that a yearly increase occurred in the frequency of “we” in EE journal papers, as well as the existence of three “we-use” types in the article conclusions and abstracts: exclusive, inclusive, and ambiguous. Other possible “we-use” alternatives such as “I” and other personal pronouns were used very rarely—if at all—in either section. These findings also suggest that the present tense was used more in article abstracts, but the present perfect tense was the most preferred tense in article conclusions. Both research and pedagogical implications are proffered and critically discussed.
Highlights
It has long been argued that scientific writing seems hesitating for its personal or impersonal authorial stances (e.g., Harwood, 2005b; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Jiang, 2018; Pho, 2008)
A survey of academic writing manuals reveals conflicting opinions regarding the use of first-person pronouns (APA Style, 2020; Bennett, 2009), with some writing centers even admonishing writers to abstain from the use of pronouns altogether in scientific writing (e.g., Enago Academy, 2019; The Writing Center, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020)
The following text [1–12] illustrates how the invisible single author used “we” (i.e., “we is I”) to express the authorial stance in an IEEE abstract as formulated in [1–12]: “In this paper, we investigate . . . We give . . . we investigate . . . we investigate . . .”: In this paper, we investigate the general form of the law of importation where is a norm and is a fuzzy implication, for the three main classes of fuzzy implications, i.e., . . . We give necessary and sufficient conditions under which the law of importation holds for XX, YY, and implications
Summary
It has long been argued that scientific writing seems hesitating for its personal or impersonal authorial stances (e.g., Harwood, 2005b; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Jiang, 2018; Pho, 2008). A survey of academic writing manuals reveals conflicting opinions regarding the use of first-person pronouns (APA Style, 2020; Bennett, 2009), with some writing centers even admonishing writers to abstain from the use of pronouns altogether in scientific writing (e.g., Enago Academy, 2019; The Writing Center, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020). Kuo (1999) maintains that the first-person pronoun “we” is used more frequently than other pronouns in scientific journals. Swales and Feak (2012) report that “we” is commonly used in the engineering genre by both single authors and co-authors, whereas the IEEE Authorship Series (published by IEEE, that is, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, n.d.) encourages writers to “write in the first-person to make it clear who has done this work and writing”
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