The use of first person pronoun in academic texts

Abstract

Academic writing has a set of rules that everyone in academia follows. One of these set rules is related to neutrality. In academia neutrality means that the author does not make their own presence noticeable in the text. This project was carried out because contemporary studies have shown that the rule of anonymity is not always the best option and an author’s stance in the form of self promotion is encouraged. This thesis focuses on self promotion in academic papers written in the department of English studies in the University of Tartu. The aim of this paper is to analyze the extent to which authors use self-promotion pronouns in their academic papers and what functions do those pronouns hold. In addition, this paper also reports on the differences between gender usage of pronouns and to control the differences between the four fields of the English studies department. This analysis focuses on master dissertations written by students of the English language department between the years 2013-2021. AntConc software was used to analyse a corpus of 36 Master’s theses.