Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

1 Preliminaries

originator. If a reader is interested in discovering more about the economic situation of contemporary Chile, for example, and has tracked down some texts on that subject, they will want to focus on the information in those texts, not on the providers of the information. For more detail on when it is and is not appropriate to use first-person pronouns, see Chapter 11 Sections 2 and 3. What we will concentrate on in this subsection are the strategies that you can employ if you wish to depersonalize your writing by avoiding the first person; avoidance of the second person will be in the following subsection. Let us consider three strategies here: (a) the use of the passive; (b) the use of nominalizations; (c) the use of ‘locative subjects’. The passive verb form is frequently employed to avoid the use of first-per son subjects. One of the communicative advantages of the passive is that it allows the person responsible for the action described in the sentence, the ‘agent’, not to be specified. Here are some examples of how a sentence with a first-person subject can be depersonalized. The second sentence of each pair is the depersonalized version: I have shown in this paper that global warming is a phenomenon whose pres ence cannot be proved scientifically. It has been shown in this paper that global warming is a phenomenon whose presence cannot be proved scientifically. Depersonalization is not impersonalization: the reader of the passive ver sions can still reconstruct the identity of the agent of show and ask respec tively. Nominalization involves replacing a verb with a noun. Whereas verbs grammatically require a subject (and possibly an object), nouns do not. This means that first-person pronouns will disappear if the nominalization option is taken. Consider nominalized versions of the preceding examples: The conclusion of this paper is that global warming is a phenomenon whose presence cannot be proved scientifically. The next assignment for the students was to compare two versions of the same text. Here show has been replaced by the noun conclusion , and ask by the noun assignment . In many cases, nominalization can be achieved by adding a nom inalizing suffix to the verb. Here the verb investigate has been nominalized by adding the ending - ation : We then asked the students to compare two versions of the same text. The students were then asked to compare two versions of the same text.

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