Pronoun

The textual purpose of personal pronouns in written discourse is to refer directly to the writer, the audience of writing, and specific things or persons other than the writer or audience. Corpus analyses of various genres have shown that personal pronouns are orders of magnitude more common than other types of pronouns, and these features are far more common in conversational than in any other type of genres. In addition to conversational discourse, personal pronouns are also encountered in fiction, but only rarely in academic text. As Biber et al. (1999) pointed out, because personal pronouns mostly refer to persons, "human beings are a more marginal topic" in academic prose. Personal examples simply cannot be considered generalizable and are most often perceived as anecdotal. For the purposes of an academic course assignment, the writer needs to be directed to cite research, literature, or other types of formal academic evidence.