REPAIRING PROBLEMS

STRATEGY 7: The Personal-Impersonal Shift

First-aid for: 'given-new', organising flow, 'light-heavy'

Here, the order of information is changed by avoiding a passive construction and instead putting the personal pronoun “we” into topic position. This strategy can improve text cohesion and readability by:
 

  • manoeuvring “we” into theme position when the “we” connects back to a familiar element and the “application of conventional controls” doesn’t
     
  • moving new information into the expected place towards the end of the sentence.

Before deciding to make use of “we”, you should scan the literature in your own field to check whether this personal pronoun is used. Although it is considered acceptable to use “we” in some fields of science and technology, other fields tend to avoid its use altogether.