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.”