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

1 Preliminaries

1.3.2 Depersonalization: second-person pronouns The avoidance of second-person pronouns ( you, your and yours ) can be achieved fairly easily, usually by simply omitting them, with or without adap tation: ▲ This paper will show you that there is cause for concern about the current situation in Western Europe. This paper will show that there is cause for concern about the current situa tion in Western Europe. ▲ I will try to persuade you in this essay that taxation levels are unacceptably high. This essay will argue that taxation levels are unacceptably high. If the result of omission is an ungrammatical sentence, you may to have to reformulate: ▲ You must be wondering what conclusions can be drawn from these observa tions. The question arises of the conclusions to be drawn from these observations. Since speech usually takes place in face-to-face interactions, the speaker and the hearer are usually familiar with each other. Speakers in general know who their hearers are and, as the dialogue progresses, gradually get to know them better. In a conversation you will make your interests and motivations appar ent and will manoeuvre the conversation topics towards your particular pre occupations. As we all know, it is often your personality that determines how successful you will be in achieving your conversational aims. In the case of an argued text of the type described in this book, the situa tion is totally different. The writer and the reader are generally unknown to each other. Because of this you are not familiar with your reader, you will not be able to use your personality to achieve communicative success but you will have to rely on the coherence of your text. Argued texts will be assessed by readers on a totally different basis than, say, a pleasant conversation. This means that many of the devices used by speakers to enliven their speech are unsuitable for written texts. In speech, there is a constant inter play of statements, questions, orders and exclamations. Writing of the rel evant type consists almost exclusively of statements. After all, there is no identifiable reader from whom to elicit an answer or to whom to issue an Familiarity versus unfamiliarity

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