The author’s voice in sciences and humanities: Insights from a researcher

The author’s stance is a topic we regularly focus on, and this semester we invited our visitors to look at it from a linguist’s perspective.

The workshop “Subjectivity in research articles: Are 'soft' sciences less objective than 'hard' ones?” on May 27 provided this perspective. The speaker Elizaveta Smirnova, Ph.D. in linguistics, shared the results of her study into the author’s stance in articles from “hard” and “soft” sciences. Workshop participants explored the notion of subjectivity in relation to academic discourse and analyzed examples from published articles. Practical tasks with the focus on lexical and grammatical stance markers equipped the colleagues with tools to carve out a clear author’s position in their own texts.

What did the workshop offer? 

• research results directly from the researcher

• a deeper understanding of subjectivity markers in sciences and humanities

• a balance of theory and practice

• clear and specific writing tips

• plenty of practice and real-life examples.

“The speaker drew on her own research in explaining the difference between the author's stance in hard and soft sciences, which was valuable. A very good balance between theory and practice!”

“I appreciated the logical progression from doing exercises to writing an abstract and utilizing all this knowledge in one's own research.The tasks were well-structured and informative.” 

“The speaker gave us detailed tips on how to write a summary in a research paper using words to enhance the author's point of view. The theoretical input and practical examples were very useful.”

Your turn to voice your requests: what aspects of research writing would you like to talk about? You can reach out to us by filling out workshop feedback forms, participating in our annual survey, or contacting us on awc@hse.ru. We design our workshops to meet your needs!