Iranian Scholars’ Revision of Their Submitted Manuscripts: Signaling Impersonality in Text

Nonnative English-speaking scholars have often been reported to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis their English native counterparts when it comes to writing a publishable research article (RA). When they submit their manuscripts to English-language journals, they sometimes receive comments criticizing their faulty English. One area of difficulty for these authors is the grammaticalization of neutrality, impersonality, and objectivity. Relying on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), as the analytic framework, and by comparing the transitivity systems of the manuscripts written by the scholars prior to submission with their after-publication version, this study investigated how this is achieved during the revision process. Results suggest that revisions tend to put the authors in the background of the text. This involves increasing the presence of relational processes and reducing the number of material ones, and as far as voice is concerned, the proportion of passive processes in relation to the active ones increases.