Writing is not just about conveying content but also about the representation of self. One of the reasons people find writing difficult is that they do not feel comfortable with the me they are portraying in their writing. Academic writing in particular often poses a conflict of identity for students in higher education, because the self which is inscribed in academic discourse feels alien to them.

The main claim of this book is that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio culturally shaped subject positions, and thereby play their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody. The first part of the book reviews recent understandings of social identity, of the discoursal construction of identity, of literacy and identity, and of issues of identity in research on academic writing. The book ends with implications of the study for research on writing and identity, and for the learning and teaching of academic writing.

The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of social identity, literacy, discourse analysis, rhetoric and composition studies, and to all those concerned to understand what is involved in academic writing in order to provide wider access to higher education. © john benjamins publishing company since this is the 100th post on explorations of style. I thought i would allow myself to return to one of my favourite topics: the notion that someone who engages in academic writing is, in fact, a writer. The most common search terms that lead people to this blog involve the words identity and writer. As a result, the post in which i first looked at this question is one of the most popular on the site. In the original post, i discussed how graduate students often embrace the category of bad writer with an ontological fervour while still disavowing the simpler category of writer.

But can you be a bad writer in any meaningful sense without being a writer? in other words, surely writer is an inductive category: if writing is an essential aspect of your life, then you are a writer. Needless to say, this move from activity to category doesnt work in all cases doing something regularly doesnt automatically turn that activity into a category. But while you may not want to adopt the personae associated with all your daily tasks think how unwieldy that would make cvs and obituaries! the transition from writing to writer is special. Being a writer may flow inductively from the act of writing, but it also doubles back and changes the act itself. Writing can be changed by the explicit adoption of the writer persona in two ways. In the first place, being a writer suggests a particular practical orientation towards the way writing fits into your life. And, in the second, being a writer suggests a more conscious awareness of writing as an intellectually complex process of transforming inchoate thoughts into meaningful text.

At the practical level, identifying yourself as a writer makes the act of writing more intentional and thus more than just a necessary evil. As a writer, you will have a reason to seek out explicit writing support or devote time to improving your abilities as a writer. My students often say to me that they would love to work more on their writing, but that they are too busy with their work.

To some extent, i take that invocation of an artificial dichotomy between writing and work as a sign of my own failures in the classroom. My job isnt just to provide helpful insights into the writing process it is also to convey the urgency of the writing task. But i try to focus more on the helpful insights since those who do buy into the urgency are poorly served by a continual harping on that theme. I continue to work on finding the best classroom balance between exhortation and instruction, but the fact remains that people who dont accept writing as central to their identity often continue to devote insufficient time to the task and to feel a commensurate frustration at their lack of improvement. At a deeper level, accepting the role of writer means accepting that you are constructing meaning through your arrangement of words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.

And readers are rarely going to be satisfied with those sorts of writer less texts. Those sorts of texts are notoriously light on the sort of signposting and metadiscourse that the reader needs to appreciate what is being presented. If you are in the habit of thinking of your text as self explanatory or if you tend to frame writing as a purely responsive act of writing up, you may be neglecting the role that you ought to be playing as writer. As the writer, you must perform the essential act of framing what is being read according to the overarching demands of your project.

I read so many selections of graduate student writing that are brimming with insight and fortified by an impressive amount of research but that lack an authorial voice to help the reader manage the text. Deepening the connection to the persona of writer is one way of reminding ourselves that our job as writer is to go beyond the provision of helpful content to the more complex task of structuring that content in a way that anticipates how the reader will experience the text. While i do believe that there is a manifest benefit to identifying ourselves as writers, id like to close by considering a possible downside to accepting this identity. Could identifying as a writer actually make things worse by hindering some students from getting the writing support that they need? unfortunately, i think that possibility exists. Some students have bound their sense of self worth so tightly to the activity of writing that they may resist accessing writing support these resistant students have often accepted the widespread notion that graduate students should already know how to write ’.