Concordancing oneself

This paper discusses the construction and analysis of a corpus of an individual's own academic writing. Following an examination of the area of academic writing and the position of academic writing corpora within it, the paper discusses how a ‘personal corpus’ might be put together, along with issues of the necessary quality and quantity of ‘text’, and problems which may arise in the construction of a personal corpus. The paper also proposes a background, general ‘reference’ corpus against which features of academic writing may be measured, whilst admitting that accessibility to, or production of, such a potentially large corpus will generally be beyond the means of many researchers interested in small-scale analyses. Using concordancers, some limited analyses of lexical, syntactic and discourse features are then presented to show how a potential personal profile might emerge. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations facing the analysis of one's own writing, but suggests that, despite limitations, worthwhile insights can be gained in respect of one's personal language awareness.