Search

Abstract: This rhetorical study investigated the employment of interpersonal metadiscourse in applied linguistics articles written in English by Anglo-American and Iranian academic writers. To this end, a representative sample of 60 conclusion sections written by the two groups of writers was selected as the corpus. The two groups of writers were compared in terms of their use of “hedges”, “emphatics”, and “attitude markers” in the extracts. The interpersonal categories were also broken down into subtypes depending on the linguistic items used, and analyzed for distribution in the conclusion sections. The functional–contextual analysis shows similarities and differences in the rhetorical behaviour of these authors in their use of interpersonal metadiscourse. There was a remarkable tendency by both writer groups towards hedging their propositions. Pronounced differences were mainly in the higher use of emphatics and attitude markers by Anglo-American authors. High certainty avoidance and abstinence from attitudinal language was noticeable amongst Iranian experts. The differences are attributed to the degree of rhetorical sensitivity to and awareness of audience, purpose, cultural leanings, and the proclivities of the disciplinary genre. The implications of this study can be helpful in academic writing, EFL writing instruction, and genre analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the significant environmental threat posed by microplastics (MPs) of varying properties, MPs research has garnered considerable attention in current academic discourse. Addressing MPs in river-lake water systems, existing studies have seldom systematically revealed the role of free radicals in the aging/degradation process of MPs. Hence, this review aims to first analyze the pollution distribution and environmental risks of MPs in river-lake water systems and to elaborate the crucial role of free radicals in them. After that, the study delves into the advancements in free radical-mediated degradation techniques for MPs, emphasizing the significance of both the generation and elimination of free radicals. Furthermore, a novel approach is proposed to precisely govern the controlled generation of free radicals for MPs' degradation by interfacial modification of the material structure. Hopefully, it will shed valuable insights for the effective control and reduction of MPs in river-lake water systems. This paper briefly describes the abundance and environmental risks of MPs in river-lake water systems and compares the research progress of various free radical-related degradation techniques, thus cleverly proposes a new insight on controllable free radical promotion mediated by interfacial modification strategies for efficient degradation of MPs. [Display omitted] • Microplastics are widely distributed in river-lake water systems. • The environmental risks of microplastics correlate closely with free radical. • Free radical-mediated degradation techniques of microplastics were elucidated. • Importance of controlling free radicals' generation and elimination was underlined. • A novel strategy on controlled promotion-generation of free radicals was proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) across markets is a pertinent topic for academic discourse and industry attention. This is evidenced by the unrelenting release of national BIM initiatives; new BIM protocols; and candidate international standards. This paper is the second part of an ongoing Macro BIM Adoption study: the first paper “Macro BIM Adoption: Conceptual Structures” (Succar and Kassem, 2015) introduced five conceptual models for assessing macro BIM adoption across markets and informing the development of BIM adoption policies. This second paper clarifies how these models are validated through capturing the input of 99 experts from 21 countries using a survey tool; highlights the commonalities and differences between sample countries with respect to BIM adoption; and introduces sample tools and templates for either developing or calibrating BIM adoption policies. Survey data collected indicate that all five conceptual models demonstrate high levels of ‘clarity’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘usefulness’, the three metrics measured. They also indicate (1) varying rates of BIM diffusion across countries with BIM capability near the lower-end of the spectrum; (2) varying levels of BIM maturity with - the mean of - most macro BIM components falling below the medium level; (3) varying diffusion dynamics across countries with the prevalence of the middle-out diffusion dynamic; (4) varying policy actions across countries with a predominance of the passive policy approach; and (5) varying distribution of diffusion responsibilities among player groups with no detectable dominant pattern across countries. The two papers provide an opportunity to improve our understanding of BIM adoption dynamics across countries. Future research can build upon the models and tools introduced to enable (a) an expansion of benchmarking data through surveying additional countries; (b) identifying BIM adoption changes in surveyed countries over time; (c) correlating changes in adoption rates/patterns with policy interventions; (d) identifying BIM policy variations within the same country; (e) establishing statistical correlations between the conceptual models; and (f) developing new tools to facilitate BIM policy development and encouraging BIM adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cambridge University Admissions Interview is a gatekeeping encounter in which academic staff members question, and evaluate, prospective undergraduates on the subject they have applied to study. It is politically controversial as admittance to Cambridge brings unparalleled educational and professional advantages, yet privately-educated candidates are disproportionately successful, and thus appear to have greater "linguistic capital" at interview, when compared with their state-educated peers. Using the techniques of interactional sociolinguistics, the following paper details the shifting interactional requirements of six admissions interviews in English Literature. It finds that a successful interview performance is, in fact, determined by a candidate's ability to manage the (sometimes opposed) requirements of being both a responsive student and a convincing peer academic. Such requirements are shown to cut across, and problematize, the direct relationship perceived to exist between socio-educational background, linguistic capital and success at interview. The results from this study are used both to draw out the differences between the admissions interview and other types of interview setting, as well as to suggest research pathways for research. • Bourdieu's "linguistic capital" does not explain Cambridge interview results. • Cambridge interviews are interactionally different to other interview types. • Candidates must show they can be responsive students and convincing peer academics. • The peer academic discourse mode is more interactionally challenging for candidates. • Linguists should work with educational sociologists to make progress in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadiscourse is now established as one of the most frequently used methods for analysing academic discourse, but one feature, frame markers, seem to have gone relatively unnoticed. Frame markers represent an important way by which authors structure their discourse for particular readers, helping them to see the coherence of arguments and guiding their thinking in the direction the author wishes to go. As a result, like all metadiscourse, it varies with audience, purpose and context and in this paper we explore this variation by studying how authors use this feature when reworking their research articles as academic blogs. Based on two corpora of 50 blog posts and 50 journal articles with the same authors and topics, we found important differences in the use of frame markers and in the distribution and frequencies of its sub-categories. The results show how writers are sensitive to reader knowledge and the kinds of assistance that expert and lay audiences may need in order to follow the author's arguments. The study thus contributes to our understanding of how writers' choices help define different rhetorical contexts and the ways that recontextualisation is accomplished across academic genres. • We examine the understudied feature of metadiscourse frame markers. • Frame markers establish coherence and relate text to readers. • Frame markers change when reworking journal articles as blogs. • Writers are sensitive to reader knowledge and help expert and lay audiences expect. • Writers' choices help define contexts and are key to recontextualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Academic discourse is characterised by being 'enormously diverse' (Hyland, 2004) because of its different disciplines and genres. Authors of academic texts are influenced by their disciplines, and by the 'discourse formats' (Fløttum et al., 2006) of what they are writing. However, genres exist across disciplines. For instance, research articles and PhD theses are found in different disciplines, namely medicine and sociology. Added to that, Systemic Functional Linguistics proposes that lexicogrammatical choices are activated by the context, which is, in this case, multiple. This paper seeks to study how the different parameters of context might influence the choices of PPs. A corpus of PhD theses and research articles from medicine and sociology is collected, and a sample is extracted and annotated via CorpusTool. The result revealed that certain choices reveal that while research articles are more similar across the disciplines, PhD theses are less restricted and disciplinary and personal differences are prominent. Highlights • Linguistic choices of Prepositional Phrases can be related to the different parameters of context in academic writing. • Certain lexico-grammatical choices are global: they reveal features of the field of academic writing, in general. • Other choices distinguish the different types of context: the genres and disciplines studied. • The boundary between genre and discipline is not fixed; it depends on the genre itself, as certain genres (Research Articles) have more restrictions than others (PhD Theses). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper investigates the rhetorical organization of the introduction sections of English and Chinese research articles in the field of educational psychology. The study reported in this paper adopts framework of move analysis. In general, the findings of the present study reveal that there are similarities and differences between English and Chinese research article introductions in terms of the employment of moves and steps. It is suggested that the rhetorical differences reflect some of the distinctive characteristics of the two different cultures, English and Chinese. The findings of the present study have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is an emic, interview-based study of computer scientists’ and sociologists’ accounts of the functions of citations in their writing. Twelve informants took part in the research, commenting upon their citations in one of their own articles. Informants were not provided with functional checklists, and were free to ascribe as many functions to each citation as they wished. Eleven citation functions are identified and described, and evidence of inter- and intra-disciplinary similarities and differences is provided. While the computer scientists used citations to direct their audience to further reading more often, the sociologists’ texts featured more cases of critical citations. The type of paper informants were writing (e.g. theoretical/empirical), the anticipated audience, and the publication outlet resulted in intra-disciplinary differences. Over half of the citations in both fields were said to have more than one function. The insights and implications of the study are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper deals with the conducive questions asked by tutors and students who try to convey their preference for a given answer from their hearer/s. In interpreting such questions, textual and contextual elements play a crucial role; in fact the view proposed here is that, beyond the level of formal conduciveness inherent in such questions, conduciveness is really the result of the overall stream of conversation and can only be adequately analysed in pragmatic terms. The paper expands and develops a prior model for the analysis of conducive questions which hinges on the concept of the polarity that exists between a questioner''s old belief underlying the question, the new assumption s/he formulates in his/her mind, the expected answer and the formal aspect of the question itself. Some classes of conducive questions are defined which express different degrees of conduciveness and convey different discourse functions. The study can also bear some practical relevance for international students as it offers an insight into an aspect of the academic discourse produced within university seminars in England and, to a lesser extent, Italy and sheds light on some of the effects of the asymmetry inherent in the tutor-students role. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Facilities Management (FM) is one of the most important economies in the world. It has been evident that there is a lack of academic writing about conflict, overlapping authority, and stakeholder relationships. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of investigating current practices for achieving effective participation of stakeholders in Facilities Management. 40 Journal articles published from 2012 to 2021 were reviewed. This article focuses on academic articles including subject areas: engineering, decision-making, and construction. It examines research trends, identifies research gaps, and potential future research directions. It was found that facility managers face challenges with stakeholders because of their lack of involvement. In addition, it was also found there was an unclear framework for involvement, and the degree of participation required by stakeholders wasn't found. This review should provide researchers with insights into where research efforts are most needed and information on how to address the challenges of FM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metadiscourse – the ways in which writers and speakers interact through their use of language with readers and listeners – is a widely used term in current discourse analysis, pragmatics and language teaching. This interest has grown up over the past 40 years driven by a dual purpose. The first is a desire to understand the relationship between language and its contexts of use. That is, how individuals use language to orient to and interpret particular communicative situations, and especially how they draw on their understandings of these to make their intended meanings clear to their interlocutors. The second is to employ this knowledge in the service of language and literacy education. But while many researchers and teachers find it to be a conceptually rich and analytically powerful idea, it is not without difficulties of definition, categorisation and analysis. In this paper I explore the strengths and shortcomings of the concept and map its influence and directions through a state of the art analysis of the main online academic databases and current published research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to review the content of Buen vivir (‘good living’) as an emergent discourse, reflecting on its genesis and contributions to the sustainability debate, as well as on incipient attempts at its institutionalization. First, we briefly revisit criticisms to the development discourse and then engage in deeper exploration of the status of its direct descendant: sustainable development (SD). Next, we consider the Latin-American position in the discursive field of SD and the situation of Buen vivir vis-à-vis SD. Drawing on the traditional repository of the continent's indigenous cultures, this discourse has been theorized in the academic sphere and translated into normative principles that have started to permeate the public, but also the political sphere, especially in Ecuador and Bolivia. In this article we refer to Buen vivir as the contemporary discursive reelaboration of the Quechua concept Sumak Kawsay and similar principles from other indigenous peoples. It includes both the idea of interdependence between society and nature and a conception of the universal as a plurality. Lastly, we outline some inbuilt tensions of the Buen vivir discourse, but also its dialogic potential with several variants of the heterogeneous discursive field around the idea of SD. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents an empirical study grounded in the Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson Archer, 2000) and employs quantitative content analysis of student discourse and other artifacts of learning in online courses in an effort to enhance and improve the framework and offer practical implications for online education. As a theoretical framework the purpose of the widely referenced CoI model is to describe, explain, and predict learning in online environments. The current study grows out of an ongoing research agenda to understand student and faculty experiences in emerging technology-mediated education systems and to make recommendations for theory and practice. The major question addressed here is whether the CoI model adequately explains effective learner behavior in fully online courses and to articulate a new conceptual element — learning presence. Results indicate that learning presence is evident in more complex learning activities that promote collaboration and is correlated with course grades. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In the last few decades the interpersonal nature of academic communication has been stressed in English for Academic Purposes literature. Taking metadiscourse as the analytical framework, this paper focuses on the cross-cultural analysis of interpersonally driven features in research article writing in a single discipline, Business Management. It aims at analysing to what extent the different contexts (i.e. the US international and the Spanish national) influence the strategic use of metadiscourse features in this discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of 24 research articles from this discipline: 12 of them written in English by scholars based at North-American institutions and published in international journals, and another 12 written in Spanish by Spanish scholars and published in national journals. Significant differences are reported on the overall frequency of metadiscourse features as well as on the particular incidence of some categories in the two sub-corpora. The particular linguistic/cultural contexts of publication seem to influence scholars’ rhetorical choices when writing their research articles. New knowledge appears to be interpersonally negotiated in different terms in research articles in the two cultural contexts within this disciplinary domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Evaluative language features prominently in academic discourse, especially in book reviews. Previous studies have suggested that the use of criticism and its mitigation devices may be culturally bound. However, so far, there has been no study which explicitly compares the use of criticism in Japanese and English book reviews. This paper investigates how criticism is managed in English and Japanese book reviews. An analysis of a corpus of twenty English and twenty Japanese book reviews in the field of linguistics shows that while there are similarities, there are distinctive differences. At the global level, praise is more prominently used in English book reviews to establish solidarity and rapport while apology and self-denigration are used in Japanese reviews. At the local level, ‘rhetorical questions’, ‘self-denigration’, ‘recasting problems as potential for future research’ and ‘attributing problems to the next generation’ are used only in Japanese reviews. The study explores the importance of taking into account both ethnic culture and small cultures in interpreting empirical data from two languages. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The study of evaluative features of language has been a productive source of insights into academic discourse in recent years, revealing the ways that persuasion is achieved in a range of genres. This research, however, has largely focused on word-level features, such as stance adverbials and evaluative adjectives (e.g. ), with the evaluative potential of clause-level resources under-explored. Nor has research had much to tell us about the more peripheral genres of the academy which are concerned with the distribution, rather than the production, of knowledge. In this paper we address both these issues by examining the role of the relative clause construction in a corpus of journal descriptions, the texts which define and endorse the goals and position of a journal. Our analysis of 200 journal descriptions in four contrasting disciplines reveals that relative clauses have an important, and perhaps surprising, role to play in this genre, functioning pragmatically as an evaluative and persuasive tool to promote academic journals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Nominalizations tend to be associated with academic writing as they can assist in maintaining an impersonal tone, often by deleting a human agent within a given sentence. There are additional functions, such as helping to create textual cohesion, all of which have relevance in the production of quality academic texts. Based on the previous work regarding the use of nominalizations within academic writing (), a question arises which this paper seeks to address. If we assume that nominalizations, to an extent, are a feature of accomplished academic writing, what are the implications for their use within each year of an undergraduate degree program—how do students develop their use of nominalizations? For purposes of addressing this question, the academic writing of six undergraduate students was analyzed throughout each year of their degree course. The six participants studied on an academic program entitled ‘Language, Literacy and Communication’ (LLC), part of the School of Education at The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, with the results demonstrating that nominalizations do not necessarily play a prominent role within the academic writing of this community. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Recent research has remarked upon the widespread use of Internet sources by undergraduate students in support of their written ideas. Results of this research indicate there is a tendency for some students to cite sources whose content meets their expedient needs, while ignoring standards of rigor typically required for academic citation. Despite this tendency, the present study explores whether Web sources which would normally be considered unconventional for academic citation, in fact, offer enriching content. This study isolates the unconventional Web references from three second-language students'' research papers for qualitative analysis. Results indicate that although the cavalier use of Web sources by students remains a serious concern, unconventional sites can sometimes be an unusually rich source of information. Such a finding has implications for how students are taught to consider Internet sources. Specifically, it is suggested that sites normally considered unconventional not be summarily dismissed as potential sources of information. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The passive voice, while traditionally thought of as contributing to an overall objective tone in academic writing, by means of either deleting or deemphasizing the subject within a sentence, can also be used to reveal writer stance. Stance refers to the ways in which writers reveal their opinions, evaluations and feelings on a given matter and passive voice has a role to play in this regard, despite its association with objectivity, which might suggest the opposite. This article begins by discussing the area of writer stance, to include the approach which is taken here, one which incorporates passives. This is followed by a discussion explaining how stance is revealed through use of passives, followed by examples taken from the essays of three undergraduate students – Janet, Colette and Gladys – in the School of Education at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate that passive stance is a rhetorical reality and, from the analysis of the students’ written work, it is seen that passive voice can in fact be a subtle way for writers to reveal themselves within their essays. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

During the last decades, development discourse has taken a neo-liberal turn. Parallel to this, the discourse of social science has become more oriented to matters of individual agency. Within the sociological and anthropological literature on development, this emphasis on individual agency is often expressed in terms of an explicit statement taken by the author that s/he wishes to correct an earlier (ethically inferior) emphasis on structure that is assumed to imply that the concerned people are passive victims. Problematising this ethics of scientific writing, this paper will look at various discourses in which the concept of victimhood is used, seeing claims and disclaimers of victimhood as themselves being expressions of agency in a contestation over accountability, responsibility, recognition and possible indemnification or blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using an eight-million word corpus made up of one-million words each of academic writing, newspapers, and fiction, and five-million words of spoken English, together with non-randomized data this paper examines 147 tokens of mind you, and its elliptical form mind, hereafter MY. The data confirm the relative infrequency of MY in general and especially its lack of use in formal written contexts. The data also confirm its much wider use in British as opposed to American English. MY is described as operating in two ways. First, MY operates in its original source meaning as an attention marker which summons the hearer''s attention through its imperative form to a repetition of, or elaboration on, information already presented in the discourse. In this use, the speaker wants to be sure that the hearer understands the full import of the highlighted information. However, this was a very infrequent use of MY yielding just 5 instantiations. Second, in its most frequent occurrence (142 tokens), MY is used as a mainly non-concessive cancellative discourse marker. In this function, MY often abruptly shifts the focus of the discourse away from the ideational content of the discourse onto the process of discourse construction itself by making overt the speaker''s own meaning making processes and his or her shifting commitment to previous arguments. In this way, the use of MY suggests unplanned, spontaneous meaning making. It is also argued that the way MY signals cancellation or a weakening of an aspect of information derivable from the previous discourse is often achieved through self-deprecation. The whole process of laying bare those inner workings, and especially the use of self-deprecation fosters interactive warmth by promoting intimacy and solidarity between the speaker and hearer. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The right to the city concept is widely debated in academic discourse yet ambiguously executed in public discourse. In much of the discussion, the right to the city is advocated as a right that humans should claim—i.e., participating in urban space living. Nonetheless, constraints and limits are imposed on such advocacy, resulting in a tokenized implementation state. With such a background surmounting the COVID-19 pandemic era, this study is aimed at understanding the right to the city propagation and revealing the possible wrongs of such civic advocacy. Multiple cases in Malaysia were selected for analysis and as the discussion context representing the state-of-the-art aspect of right to the city in the context of an emerging country. Two potential misconceptions through the action of right to the city were identified: first, the concept of right to the city has the potential to infringe the centrality of power, which both citizens and the authority have to make clear; second, the lack of a sign of contribution from citizens poses a severe challenge to build a co-created urban space for all. This paper contributes to removing a blind spot—the possible wrong to the right to the city—and provides ideas to achieve authentic citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In academic writing the construction of an authorial identity is constrained by different social, biographical and academic factors as writers bring their diverse personal experiences to a text. One of these factors is that of gender, although this has been far less studied in published academic writing than in other forms of social interaction. In this paper, we explore the issue of gender in academic interactions by analyzing a corpus of academic book reviews and interviews with academics from Philosophy and Biology. Focusing on metadiscourse features, we examine the similarities and differences in the rhetorical practices of male and female academics in their construction of a disciplinarily appropriate identity. Our findings show while there is no one-to-one relation between gender and language, gender and discipline identities cross-cut each other in significant ways in the context of professional self-conception and personal preferences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper attempts to identify knowledge claims in the introduction section of 50 English research articles in economics and linguistics. The articles are part of the KIAP Corpus. My analysis reveals that the introductions in both disciplines typically state claims. The construction of the claims is quite complex, with text sequences containing so-called preview sentences as well as claim sentences proper; in linguistics, preview and actual claim may even be combined within the same sentence. Claims in both disciplines tend to be unhedged, but with slightly more hedging in linguistics than in economics. Claims in both disciplines may be signalled by expression such as The key message is…, but this feature is most prominent in economics. It is argued that the reason for this is that economics is a more competitive field than linguistics, encouraging explicit signalling of new claims in order to attract the attention of the research community. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Academic writers leave traces of themselves in their writing which may be linked to national as well as disciplinary culture. This paper takes a doubly contrastive approach and investigates writer manifestation in three languages, English, French and Norwegian, and three disciplines, economics, linguistics and medicine, in order to see whether language or discipline is the most important variable governing the pattern of metatext in academic discourse. My corpus consists of 180 refereed research articles within these languages and disciplines. My findings suggest that the language variable is the most important one within economics and linguistics, where English and Norwegian show very similar patterns, using much more metatext than French; within medicine, all three languages display a uniform pattern of little metatext. I conclude that English and Norwegian are both representatives of writer responsible cultures, while French represents a reader responsible culture. As regards discipline, I suggest that since economics and linguistics have a less formalised research article text structure and to some extent create their findings through argumentation in the text, national culture will be more important than it is in medicine, where the IMRD (Introduction–Method–Results–Discussion) structure is globally implemented and the research data to a greater extent are given outside the text. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Studies of scientific metaphors have largely focused on the existence, application, and function of metaphors in specialist scientific discourse, in some way overlooking the use of scientific metaphors in non-specialist discourses, in particular that of popularization. Richard Boyd (Boyd, Richard, 1993. Metaphor and theory change: what is “metaphor” a metaphor for? In: Ortony, Andrew (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 481–533) is an exception, however. He suggests the existence of two fundamentally separated categories of scientific metaphors: theory-constructive and pedagogical/exegetical metaphors. Whereas the theory-constructive metaphors represent original scientific thought and terminology, pedagogical metaphors merely describe or explain existing knowledge. The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between these two categories of metaphors from a pragmatic and empirical perspective. The analysis is based on a case study of the application of metaphors describing the genetic code and protein synthesis in three specialist and three non-specialist scientific articles. The study reveals that, depending on context and genre, exactly the same metaphors are used for theory-constructive and for pedagogical purposes. Consequently, metaphors should not be classified according to the individual expressions, but in relation to the developmental history of the specific metaphor, as well as such parameters or criteria as communicative purpose and genre. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Academic writing is not just about conveying an ideational ‘content’, it is also about the representation of self. Recent research has suggested that academic prose is not completely impersonal, but that writers gain credibility by projecting an identity invested with individual authority, displaying confidence in their evaluations and commitment to their ideas. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of such an authorial identity is the use of first person pronouns and their corresponding determiners. But while the use of these forms are a powerful rhetorical strategy for emphasising a contribution, many second language writers feel uncomfortable using them because of their connotations of authority. In this paper I explore the notion of identity in L2 writing by examining the use of personal pronouns in 64 Hong Kong undergraduate theses, comparisons with a large corpus of research articles, and interviews with students and their supervisors. The study shows significant underuse of authorial reference by students and clear preferences for avoiding these forms in contexts which involved making arguments or claims. I conclude that the individualistic identity implied in the use of I may be problematic for many L2 writers. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]