My Construct

I am not sure how aware you all are that I do the same or similar assignment to the ones that I assign you.  This means that I am reading the same articles and responding to them, plus some more for the class I am taking.  I am also working on Project #1.  My Topic Proposal details what I want to approach:

• I would like to explore how pronoun usage defines the writer's relationship with his or her audience.  I am unsure if any research has been done in this area.  But I often feel that when pronoun antecedents are clear, readers have a better understanding of their relationship to the work they are reading.  I think of Michael Moore, in particular, when I discuss pronouns in freshman English classes.  Michael Moore tend to run heavy in his usage of "you" as a general referral to his audience and as a way to connect to the audience members, but this general second person pronoun can also be recognized as limiting his audience to, possibly, those individuals with lower education levels.  The other reason I like (and ask for) clear pronoun antecedents is to help encourage a more academic tone in my students' writing.  I would like to see if any research exists on this topic and, hopefully, solidify my position on this issue.

As I have researched this topic, I have started looking at author identity, author persona, audience, and personal or first person pronouns.  I have found the following authors useful so far:

• Roz Ivanic
• Karinne W. Gordon
• Enrique Lafuente Millán
• Amy Burgess
• Nigel Harwood
• Ken Hyland
• Paul Kei Matsuda
• Christine M. Tardy
• Kate Pantelides 
• Mariaelena Bartesaghi
• Ramona Tang
• Suganthi John
• Bronwyn T. Williams

My first Introduction and Synthesis looked follows.  I tried two different approaches to the introduction because I was not sure how I wanted to connect with my audience.  Did I want to be conversational and funny, or did I want to come across as a professional academic?  The professional academic is the more standard voice for the discourse community, so I also wrote the synthesis in that tone.

Conversational/Funny Introduction:

• I will start at the beginning:  You, a middle or high school student, wake up at a desk.  Perhaps the situation is wrong because you should not be sleeping in class, or perhaps you are Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap and you have just jumped into this body teaming with adolescent hormones.  At any rate, your English teacher is elaborating on the proper use of personal pronouns and how you are now allowed to use "I," "me," "us," "we," and "you" in your essays as long as you are fairly clear as to the antecedents (a word you do not understand because you were sleeping) of the pronouns because you will (1) sound more authoritative in your essays, (2) connect better with your intended audience, and (3) at the very least and if you do a good job of producing a five paragraph essay, you will get a high score on the essay portion of the SAT you are planning to take next month.  However, your teacher fails to mention that academics across the academy, that scientists, and that even businessmen use personal pronouns in their writing fairly frequently and still manage to sound educated and professional. 

Professional Academic Introduction and Synthesis:

• Writers who have a sense of their identity/persona as writers, who have a familiarity of the writing that occurs in their genre or field, and who use personal pronouns intentionally within their writing do so as a means to connect with their intended audiences.   They demonstrate that a well-placed personal pronoun can sound authoritative, can be academic or professional, and can enable a conversational engagement of a reader.  Interestingly enough, intentional overuse of personal pronouns with the intent to connect in a conversational manner with a nonacademic audience can also be an effective devise and can be just as authoritative.
• The resultant problems of academic writers choosing to employ personal pronouns have much to do with education and intent.  To begin solving problems in education, especially those problems resulting from the (rescinding) complete ban of personal pronouns in secondary education, Karinne W. Gordon, in "Personal Voice in Academic Writing," advocates that "one of the best ways to help students develop an academic writing style that is forceful, direct, and honest, is to teach them how to use personal pronouns judiciously as they learn to develop their natural voice and accept ownership for the content of their writing" (44).  That educators should take the time to develop young authorial identities/personas within students and help them learn how to effectively use personal pronouns in not necessarily a well-liked idea because doing so causes extra work for educators.  However, developing students as writers who identify with their authorial identities/personas and who know how to use personal pronouns well will not only allow them to succeed on the written portion of the SAT, it will help them shift easily into Ivanic's three definitions of self—autobiographical self, discoursal self, and self as author—wherein during the time students spend in post secondary education, they will be refining their authorial identities/personas instead of beginning to form them.
• The instance of personal pronoun use that occurs for the most part in higher levels of post secondary education, in academia, and in other fields where authorial identities/personas are well formed and easily adapted to fit the conversation and that is not always intended as an engagement of the audience on friendly terms is the use of personal pronouns to market oneself, to stake a claim on the information or argument presented, and to forcefully insert oneself as an authority.  However, in some fields, this stake claiming is necessary:  "The adoption of a competent identity or persona is instrumental in order to make an article persuasive and this is partly achieved through the use of self-mention markers such as first person pronouns and self-citation (Hyland, 2001), inasmuch as they allow writers to emphasize their own contribution to the field and to gain credibility in the eyes of their peer readers" (Millán 37).  This type of self-insertion and self-mention, as an example, is evident in Roz Ivanic's Writing and Identity:  The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing, which is her Ph.D. dissertation and in which she specifically uses personal pronouns in the introduction to engage and sway the reader.  Later, Ivanic mentions other research she has conducted and published, which, as Millán observes, is how becoming recognized in a sometimes crowded academia occurs.

I am in the process of revising my approach and my topic.  I am looking at how students writers gain authority and how they use personal pronouns to do so.  I do think that personal pronouns are an important part of obtaining identity as a writer.  I think that they also help new academic writers begin to understand how writing is a conversation and how to connect to audience through specific word choices, like personal pronouns.

I wanted to share.  This assignment can be a struggle.  Please let me know if you need help.