Page 144 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

130 CHAPTER 6
Similarly, second-person pronouns can be replaced by the indefinite pro- noun one (Jordan, 1997) or common nouns such as buyers/investors:
• if the money you have is for the rest of your life—if the money one/buyers/in- vestors invest(s) is/represents their entire savings, if one invests all his or her money
• you (should buy their stock)—one/investors/buyers/interested consumers
According to Biber et al. (1999), in conversation the first-person pro- noun / is repeated 10 times more frequently than all other personal pro- nouns combined. Thus, the uses of the first-person pronoun tend to impart conversational and colloquial tone to written academic prose—a point worth making in teaching formal academic writing.
Pronouns as Noun Replacements
In academic essays, the use of third-person singular and plural pronouns can be advisable because they impart detachment, formality, and objectivity (Hacker, 1994; Leki, 1999). Although functions of pronouns are far more complex than mere noun replacement, in L2 academic prose their usesmay be necessary when a particular noun is repeated to excess (see chap. 5). For example, in the following excerpt from a student's assignment, the noun phrase employed women is repeated several times in a relatively short text:
As the number of employed womenhas increased, marketers and consumerresearch- ers interested in employed women who are young and have great consumptionpower. Women's employment outside of the home has led to changes the lifestyle which affect consumptionpatterns.Astheirlifestyle ischanged,theemployedwomenhavebeendom- inated by many factors in selecting clothing. What factors influenced the employed women in the selection of apparel? So it is important for marketers to understand the
factors that have impact on employed women's clothing decision making.
However, merely replacing repeated nouns and noun phrases with corre- sponding pronouns (e.g., employed women—they) can lead to ambiguous and unclear constructions. For example,
?Many stores accept credit cards, but they can be expensive.
The reason that simply substituting pronouns for repeated nouns may notworkwellinthisexampleisthatthe sentencemanystoresacceptcreditcards contains two plural nouns: stores and credit cards, both of which can be re- ferred to by the pronoun they, resulting in a confusing structure. Another problem with replacing nouns with pronouns can be noted if a relatively lengthy amount of text separates the noun and the pronoun replacement:
cation. That is, the content and the method of education change not due to the problems
TLFeBOOK