Writing And Identity, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Writer Identity on the agenda in theory and in practice.

In this concluding chapter Ivanič sums up the “so what?” of her work, and lays out suggestions for further explorations along the same lines. Her contribution toward an understanding of writer identity is relevant to two main “agendas:” theorizing writing in general, and the teaching and learning of academic writing, in particular. Though her study has honed in on a particular type of writer in a particular type of setting, it could be usefully applied in a wide range of other contexts, to other populations of writers.

Much of the chapter reiterates important concepts and key points made in the rest of the book, chapter by chapter, and indeed could be used as a basic outline of the text. She also lists concepts and questions that she has not pursued, which could usefully orient future research. Citing bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she advocates a liberatory, [Freirean] pedagogy, listing four “criteria” for research and practice: 1) relevance (to writer-learners), 2) explanatory power, 3) accessibility, and emancipatory power (336-7). “Such a pedagogy is founded on a view of learners as intellectuals, as researchers, and as active participants in social struggles, not just passively receiving knowledge and advice,” but learning writing as a tool for “their own emancipatory and transformatory action (337-8).

“Writing is not a neutral ‘skill,’ but a socio-political act of identification” (345). “The fact that we are putting ourselves on the line in a relatively non-negotiable way is one of the things that makes writing difficult.” [It is interesting in this context to consider how this description of writing aligns with a disciplinary regime; how does this change in the current, increasingly post-disciplinary context? Assuredly, one attraction of the automated plagiarism we see today is that the “writer” can avoid “putting themselves on the line.” Throughout the book, we have seen students wrestling with academic discourse and working to choose how much to accommodate to, what to internalize, and what to resist; now they can simply push a button and Copilot (etc.) will “rewrite” their text in any desired style or “mood.”

Ivanič has earlier shown great empathy with struggling writers, and reasserts her own ideas (from chapter 4) for how plagiarism should be addressed, not as a crime, but as a (misguided?) attempt to identify with the academic community (330).

I have often had the experience myself of not being able to find the right words for what I want to write, and then realizing that it is not so much a problem of the meaning I want to convey as a problem of what impression of myself I want to convey. (336)

This passage perfectly summarizes the tension in the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B,” between the white teacher’s confident assertion

let that page come out of you— 

Then, it will be true. 

And the black narrator’s response,

I wonder if it's that simple?

since for this writer, the question of how his writing will be received and the “impression of myself I want to convey” cannot be backgrounded. In any event this sort of anxiety is what Grammarly and other “word-smoothers” feed off of, “correcting” the text into a blandly acceptable form. Just type up that text that came “out of you,” then hit this button and the text will be white.

Writing And Identity, Chapter 10

 

Summary of Chapter 10: Multiple possibilities for self-hood in the academic discourse community.

Having in the previous chapter discussed how the subject positions writers can adopt are shaped by academic discourses, she now turns it around and looks at it from the writer’s point of view, in terms of how they construct an authorly source in tandem with the discourse they are writing in (what she defined as “possibilities for self-hood” back in Chapter 1). On the one hand these possibilities are largely determined by the values and expectations of the specific fields of study the students are writing in; on the other hand each of the papers Ivanič discusses is a hybrid product of multiple discourses, which the author draws on. Ivanič provides detailed analysis of how this construction of self-hood takes place differently in the fields of sociology, literary and cultural studies, and natural sciences; with charts showing typical “lexico-syntactic characteristics” associated with each. By adopting these, writers are demonstrating that they share the “interests, values, and practices” of said discipline (289). Ivanič distinguishes between “student” and “contributor” roles available to writers, with different expectations in terms of tone, word choice, citation use, and so on. Writers adopting the “contributor role” are taking on the persona of an “established member” (300) of the discourse community, confident in their “right to speak” (301).

She delineates eight [dimensions] (which she calls “ideologies”) of subject positioning, which create a space in which the disciplines are distinguished from each other, and also in which writers position themselves relative to the discipline in which they are writing. These [dimensions] take the form of continua between “relatively oppositional” and “relatively conventional” terms, to wit:

1) dismissing established authorities; revering established authorities

2) subjective; objective

3) recognizing personal experience as relevant; impersonal, dismissing personal experience

4) constructivist; positivist

5) organic, open-ended, provisional, exploratory; linear, conclusive, expository

6) committed; neutral

7) co-operative; competitive

8) accessible; exclusive (304)

Ivanič walks us through each of these in turn, showing how different disciplines take different stances on the various continua, and also how individual authors situate themselves. Finally, she turns to other, non-academic aspects of identity which shape students’ writing, such as political discourses and affiliation, or relative experiences of privilege or lack thereof.

Writing and Identity, Chapter 8

Summary of Chapter 8: The sense of self and the role of the reader in the discoursal construction of writer identity

In this very interesting chapter Ivanič focuses on how writers create a “discoursal self” in their writing, particularly in relation to their expected readership (in the case of Ivanič’s co-researchers, these are their tutors and graders). Writers adopt discourses, voice, phrasing, vocabulary, and discursive strategies partially out of a desire to identify or “own” these, and partially out of a belief that they are expected to. Drawing on conversations with writers over their writings and the comments left by mentors and graders, Ivanič develops a rich discussion of the variety of decisions writers make to adopt, accommodate, or resist scholarly discourse and construct a textual discoursal identity which reflects their “real” self, a self they aspire to become, or a persona they feel they are required to perform.

The chapter gives great nuance as to how writers not only construct a discoursal identity they can “own,” but also accommodate or resist discourses which they feel are forced upon them. One method of muted or partial resistance is “disowning,” or distancing the words from their own voice, for instance by using quotation marks. More pointedly, they can also reject stances or discoursal strategies they feel are expected of them, but which they dislike or disagree with. Writers had a sense of the “dominant ideologies” of their particular academic communities, with which they either sought to align or, more commonly, maintain some distance from. At the same time, they often assumed their readers would hold with the values and expectations of the dominant ideology, which shaped their strategies of appropriation, accommodation, or resistance. “In either case they have to decide how far they will be true to themselves in appropriating these values and meeting these expectations, how far they are prepared to accommodate them for ulterior motives, and how far they are determined to resist them” (245).

Ivanič notes the “fluidity of self” as writers take new words and discourse strategies into their writing repertoire: “people’s identities are in a constant state of flux as a result of participation in new discourses. It is not just a question of a few new words here and there, but a whole new way of being...” (242). She pays particular attention to the power relations between academic writers and the readers who will be grading and evaluating them:

Dominant practices, conventions, ideologies don’t position writers directly. The power relationship between reader and writer … mediates the influence of the wider social context on the individual writer.

She reiterates the connection made in an earlier chapter with Goffman’s concept of “protective practices” in interaction, whereby participants in a conversation (or in this case, writers) help their interlocutors (in this case, readers) maintain their performance of identity, tying this to Bakhtin’s concept of addressivity.

Writing and Identity, Chapter 7

Summary of Chapter 7: The origin of discoursal identity in writers’ experience

Chapter 5 was an overview of the remainder of the book, and Chapter 6 a case study; Chapter 7 returns to some interesting theorization and illustration of interdiscursivity and intertextuality, relating to the ways in which writers develop their own (or rather, “owned”) “voice” in writing through interactions and experiences with other writers’ and speakers’ use of language.

As people write, they have no alternative but to draw on the voices with which they are familiar: to write in ways that they have acquired through their life experience. Some writers have an immense repertoire of voices, or ‘styles’, from which to choose; some bring to the act of writing a set of contradictory voices: a repertoire shaped by a very varied life. (184)

Ivanič traces this through conversations with her co-researchers, in which they discuss where they feel particular aspects of their writing came from, and why they chose to write in this way. The discussion takes on an impressive variety of aspects of writing: use of tense; agency vs. passivity; lexis; clause length; noun/verb ratio; nominalizations and abstract nouns; metaphor; lexical density; sentence length; use of pronouns; triadic structure; and the “flow” suitable for writing in specific disciplines. She gives a rich variety of examples of writers talking about how they are positioning themselves in relation to some influential or received voice or discourse, and their rationales for identifying with or distancing themselves from it, ventriloquating, or adopting it as their own.

Writers are positioned not in some abstract way by their selection from an ‘array of mediational means’ which are magically available to all, but this positioning is shaped by their past encounters with these discourses embodied in real individuals, their voices and their texts. (212)

I suggest that there is a similarly rich history behind every piece of writing, if only every writer had the opportunity to reveal it. (211)

 

Writing and Identity, Chapter 4

Summary of Chapter 4: Issues of identity in academic writing

In this chapter Ivanič reviews the literature on student writers in an academic setting. She traces the development in this field from an original perspective focused on product, meaning, how to get students to produce particular written products; to an exploration of process, the process of learning and writing; to the contemporary interest in writing as social. Much of the discussion involves navigating the relationship between “social construction” and “social interaction,” i.e., the extent to which identity, meaning, values, etc. can be treated as entities, or as created by entities (e.g., culture, “society,”) preceding and above the level of individuals; or as the product of individual agents in interaction.

Along these lines, she reviews competing understandings of the concept of discourse community: as abstract (that is, along the lines of “culture,” or “interpretive community”) or as concrete (aka, as a speech community in the sociolinguistic usage). She notes that academic discourse communities share not only written but also spoken discourses, and adds that “it is necessary to recognize the interests, values, and practices which hold people together and see how discourse emerges from those, rather than starting by looking at discourse” (80). She argues against what she terms an “initiation” approach which sees academic discourse communities as possessing set characteristics and practices which students need to be “initiated” into to master; rather, we need to understand these discourse communities as situated in time and place, and as changing through time, in part through the re-interpretation and modification of practices by new entrants:

Academic discourse communities are constituted by a range of values, assumptions, and practices. Individuals have to negotiate an identity within the range of possibilities for self-hood which are supported or at least tolerated by a community and inscribed in that community’s communicative practices. Discourse community members, of varying affiliations in relation to the values, assumptions, and practices, are also locked in complex interpersonal relationships, characterized by differences in status and power …. (82)

From a discussion of “boundary” writers (those whose different writing style or values causes them troubles in trying to conform to a written discourse community), she applauds researchers and teachers who recognize that “disadvantage is constructed by the system, not a characteristic of people” (83). She quotes Patricia Bizzell to the effect that “We should accustom ourselves to dealing with contradictions, instead of seeking a theory that appears to abrogate them,” and concludes that “Discourse communities are the ‘social’ element in the expression, ‘the social construction of identity.’”

Ivanič reviews studies discussing how writer-learners should learn to imitate, not the “product or the process of writing,” but the writer (85), in a form of “identity modelling” (though she is critical of this term). However, learners should not, or do not, just mimic, but construct a “compromise” between existing conventions and their own idiosyncracies:

A writer’s identity is not individual and new, but constituted by the discourses s/he adopts. On the other hand, a writer’s identity is determined not completely by other discourses, but rather by the unique way she draws on and combines them. (86)

[A productive way to think the intersection between the “Unique”/haecceity, and discourse as structuring.] She references some interesting-sounding studies on plagiarism, notably by Ron Scollon, then discusses Roger D. Cherry’s distinction between two aspects of identity in writing: ethos (aka character, from Aristotle’s rhetorical triad of ethos/pathos/logos), and persona (aka social role). Among critical approaches to academic discourse, she notes the use by Geoffrey Chase of terminology adapted from Henry Giroux’s critical pedagogy, referring to three stances taken by learners: accommodation (learning to accept conventions), and opposition (involving a more broad critique of the dominant ideology) (92). Ivanič notes that she has used this approach in the past, but now considers it to assume “too monolothic a view of academic discourse.”

She discusses some reasons why her particular interest in the writer’s construction of identity has not been a focus of scholarship up to her time of writing (1998): one being an emphasis on the reader, which took the writer for granted. At the same time, the development of the social view of writing in opposition to the earlier process view (each diagrammed on pages 95 and 96) led to some blinders. The process theorists somewhat uncritically celebrated the idea of “voice,” as in, each writer needs to find their own “voice.” This was then criticized by the social theorists as too romantic and simplistic, fetishizing individual creativity at the expense of understanding the social and discursive context of creation. Ivanič agrees with this critique, but suggest that in “denying the existence of a writer’s ‘voice,’ I think that these theorists lost sight of other aspects of the writer which are extremely important to a social view of writing” (97). Ironically, the use of the term “voice” is back in fashion among critical social theorists of writing, from its use in translations of Bakhtin, but with a changed meaning:

‘Voice’ in this new way of thinking is multiply ambiguous, meaning a socially shaped discourse which a speaker can draw upon, and/or an actual voice in the speaker’s individual history, and/or the current speaker’s unique combination of these resources...

She concludes by folding insights from the current chapter back into her earlier elaboration of Goffman’s theory of self-presentation, adapted for writing (as opposed to face-to-face interaction, as in the original). Much of Goffman’s face-to-face terminology, such as the use of “clothing” and “furniture,” in interaction, remains useful as metaphor, because in writing, “The encounter between performer and audience may be removed in time and space, but it is still an encounter” (100). She notes some standard criticisms of Goffman, such as that he acts as if individuals are consciously strategizing at all times, and that they inhabit a community of shared values and understandings, “which might be relatively true in a small, close community like the Shetland Isles” (102). She includes an interesting discussion of Goffman’s “protective practices” whereby performers and audience cooperate in perception management (the former by trying to save face in interaction, the second by using tact, etc., to help the performer maintain face). Readers, in contrast, are not as likely to feel the situational compulsion to help the performer maintain face; even worse, graders of academic papers often think of themselves as on a mission to point out the writer’s inadequacies. [In this light, cf. Sedgwick on “reparative reading.”]

She concludes with a discussion of the three aspects of “identity” as the term is often used: 1) the product of processes shaping the individual; 2) the way they position and portray or enact themselves; and 3) the way they are understood by readers/interlocutors. Rather than teasing out one of these as the true “identity,” Ivanič prefers to consider how they are interrelated, and situationally more or less relevant, though her book will (as stated in earlier chapters) focus on the construction and interplay of the “autobiographical self” and the “discoursal self.”

Writing and Identity, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Literacy and Identity

In this brief chapter Ivanič extends the concerns of the previous chapter to the subject of literacy. She notes that there are two ways the term “literacy” is used: the traditional or common meaning of ability to read and write, and the more nuanced and productive meaning, “way(s) of using written language” (58). The latter meaning is the focus here, as this allows for a variety of considerations of how literacy is embedded in social context (59). Ivanič has criticisms for the old “great divide” theory of Ong, etc., which posited a vast cognitive gap between pre-literate and literate societies, as well as for the idea that literacy is “decontextualized” in comparison with face-to-face speech. She points out that this narrows the meaning of “context” to physical presence. In addition to physical presence, she delineates two additional aspects of context: 1) an interactional level of the purposes to which communication is put, and the relationships in which it takes place, and 2) the context of culture (from Halliday), meaning “competing systems of values, beliefs, and practices” which shape and constrain both spoken and written communication (60).

She explores the idea of an “ecology of literacy,” in which various, diverse practices of reading each have their own “ecological niche” (62). The concepts of literacy practice and literacy event are discussed, both of which get beyond the reductionist view of literacy as a “skill,” and also bring into focus the broader social and cultural contexts in which literacy is practiced. She emphasizes the distinction between “the actual, observable practices of individuals, and the abstract, theoretical idea of the practices which are the norm for a cultural group” (67); however, she does not follow Gee (1990) in adopting distinct terms for these. She discusses the problems with verbs like “learn” and “acquire” in relation to literacy, which treat it as a pre-formed ability or resource that students earn or strive for; instead she prefers verbs like “develop” or “extend,” one “extends” one’s literacy practices. “What distinguishes students is not whether they are or are not literate, but the characteristics of the repertoire of resources they bring with them to the task” (70).

Identity is the book’s theme: “acquiring certain literacy practices involves becoming a certain type of person” (67). She concludes with some terminology adopted from other scholars: e.g., Besnier’s distinction between person (or role) and self (individual) as two aspects of identity; some writing (such as a sermon, or an academic paper) foregrounds the person, while other forms (such as personal letters) foreground the self. A quote from Gee spells out the positions of insider, colonized, and outsider in relation to a discourse; notably, “colonized students control and accept values in the Discourse just enough to keep signalling that others in the Discourse are their ‘betters’ and to become complicit with their own subordination” (Gee, quoted on p. 73).

Writing and Identity, Chapter 1

Roz Ivanič (1998) Writing and Identity: The discoursal construction of identity in academic writing. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

Summary of Chapter 1: Introduction

Ivanič introduces herself and her reasons for writing this book, which will be about the “social struggles in which the self is implicated through the act of writing” (2); as she nicely summarizes her thesis:

Writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped possibilities for self-hood, playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs, and interests which they embody. (32)

She will explore this topic through case studies involving “mature students” entering higher education over the age of 25; she argues that the particular challenges faced by such students in constructing an academic identity provide “crucial moments in discourse” (5) which reveal the workings of identity construction through [articulation], more generally. Much of this introduction is a brief review of the various terminologies that have been used to discuss identity, self, “persona,” etc. in various disciplines; the key points of which will be returned to in more depth in future chapters. Taking a departure from Goffman’s Forms of Talk she delineates four subjects she will be focusing on: 1) the autobiographical self; 2) the discoursal self; 3) self as author; and 4) possibilities for self-hood.

The first, autobiographical self, is “the identity which people bring with them to any act of writing, shaped as it is by their prior social and discoursal history” (24); this involves also interpretation or the representation of their past, to themselves. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-performer.” The autobiographical self is not necessarily conscious, nor often clearly available from the text itself. (I am reminded of an introduction to Plutarch’s Lives which I was recently reading, in which the author scours Plutarch’s writings for any biographical information, and has to admit that the few elements that could be scraped together might well be fictive.) Her research questions in regard to the autobiographical self are (25):

a. What aspects of people’s lives might have led them to write in the way that they do?

b. How has their access to discourses and associated positionings been socially enabled or constrained?

c. More generally, how does autobiographical identity shape writing?

The second, discoursal self is “the impression – often multiple, sometimes contradictory – which they consciously or unconsciously conveys of themself in a particular written text,” that is, “constructed through the discourse characteristics of a text. This is Goffman’s “writer-as-character.” Her research questions on this self are (25-6):

a. What are the discourse characteristics of particular pieces of writing?

b. What are the social and ideological consequences of these characteristics for the writers’ identities?

c. What characteristics of the social interaction surrounding these texts led the writers to position themselves in these ways?

d. More generally, what processes are involved in the construction of a discoursal self, and what influences shape discoursal identities?

The third, self as author, regards the writer’s development of an authorial voice, not to mention of “authoritativeness,” particularly in the case of academic writing. In the case of Ivanič’s mature students [or for my purposes, non-academic autoethnographers], she notes that “the writer’s life-history may or may not have generated ideas to express, and may or may not have engendered in the writer enough of a sense of self-worth to write with authority, to establish an authorial presence” (26). [Thus there is an intersectionality to the development of authorial voice, of the confidence to feel that you are the one to write about this in this way]. Her research questions here (27):

a. How do people establish authority for the context of their writing?

b. To what extent do they present themselves or others as authoritative?

To these three aspects of writer identity is appended the fourth subject, which is “possibilities for self-hood in the socio-cultural and institutional context,” in other words, what sorts of identities, positions, etc. are culturally available for writers to adopt or adapt. She discusses the term “subject position,” but prefers the term “positionings” to emphasize that this is a process; though at the same time she does not want to present “a rather cosy, over-optimistic picture of unlimited alternatives” (28), and so will use both “position” and “positioning,” depending on which aspect of [the conduct of conduct] she wishes to emphasize. She lists the following research questions on this subject (29):

a. What possibilities for self-hood, in terms of relations of power, interests, values, and beliefs are inscribed in the practices, genres, and discourses which are supported by particular socio-cultural and institutional contexts?

b. What are the patterns of privileging among available possibilities for self-hood?

c. In what ways are possibilities for self-hood and patterns of privileging among them changing over time?

Besides Goffman, she references Foucault’s technologies of the self; a glance at the bibliography suggests key interlocutors will be Fairclough, Bakhtin, and Halliday, among others.