Authorial Identity
A Graduate Student Odyssey
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.v6i1.31Keywords:
authorial identity, discourse community, rhetorical strategies, citation styles, referencing conventionsAbstract
Doctoral students who seek to become part of what Geertz called “intellectual villages” (Geertz 1983: 157) must acculturate themselves into the ways of being, knowing, and especially writing in an academic discourse community. In this autobiographical case study, I use the academic writing I produced as a doctoral student to explore the process of developing an academic identity. I analyzed my writing for the absence or presence of the following rhetorical strategies: referencing conventions, use or avoidance of the scholarly I, and use of questions in the text. This critical examination of my writing illustrates the ways in which I experimented with my emerging academic identity as I struggled to begin participating meaningfully in the ongoing conversation within the discourse community I sought to join.
References
American Psychological Association (APA) (2001) Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition). Washington, D. C.: American Psychological Association.
Baynham, M. (1999) Double-voicing and the scholarly “I”: On incorporating the words of others in academic discourse. Text 19: 485–504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1999.19.4.485.
Berkenkotter, C. and Huckin, T. (1995) Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Berkenkotter, C., Huckin, T. and Ackerman, J. (1988) Conventions, conversations, and the writer: Case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. Research in the Teaching of English 22: 9–44. http://www.ncte.org/journals/rte/issues/v22-1.
Boughey, C. (2000) Multiple metaphors in an understanding of academic literacy. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 6: 279–290. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713698740.
Bridwell-Bowles, L. (1998) Freedom, form, function: Varieties of academic discourse. In J. Z. Schmidt (ed.) Women/Writing/Teaching, 179–197. Albany: State University of New York.
Burke, K. (1967) The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Coffin, C. (2009) Incorporating and evaluating voices in a Film Studies thesis. Writing & Pedagogy 1(2): 163–193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/wap.v1i2.163.
Coniam, D. (2004) Concordancing oneself: Constructing individual textual profiles. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9: 271–298. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/wap.v1i2.163.
Delpit, L. (2006) Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press.
Denzin, N. (1978). The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Dowdey, D. (1992) Citation and documentation across the curriculum. In M. Secor and D. Charney (eds.) Constructing Rhetorical Education 330–351. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Elbow, P. (1973) Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press.
Emig, J. (1972) The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. NCTE Research Report No. 13. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Gee, J. P. (1989) Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal of Education 171: 5–25. http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ399918.
Geertz, C. (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, C. (1988) Words and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Graff, G. (2007) Our undemocratic curriculum. In R. Feal (ed.) Profession 128–135. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C. (2006) They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Hendricks, M. and Quinn, L. (2000) Teaching referencing as an introduction to epistemological empowerment. Teaching in Higher Education 5: 447–457. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713699175.
Herrington, A. (1985) Writing in academic settings: A study of the contexts for writing in two chemical engineering courses. Research in the Teaching of English 19: 331–359. http://www.ncte.org/journals/rte/issues/v19-4.
Heyl, B. (2001) Ethnographic interviewing. In Paul Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, and L. Lofland (eds.) Handbook of Ethnography 369–383. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Hyland, K. (2002a) Authority and invisibility: Authorial identity in academic writing. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1091–1112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00035-8.
Hyland, K. (2002b) What do they mean? Questions in academic writing. Text 22: 529–557. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/text.2002.021.
Ivani?, R. (1994) I is for Interpersonal: Discoursal construction of writer identities and the teaching of writing. Linguistics and Education 6(1): 3–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0898-5898(94)90018-3.
Ivanic , R. and Camps, D. (2001) I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 10: 3–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1060-3743(01)00034-0.
John, S. P. (2009) The influence of revision on first person pronoun use in thesis writing. Writing and Pedagogy 1(2): 227–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/wap.v1i2.227.
Johnson, H. (2001) The PhD student as an adult learner: Using reflective practice to find and speak in her own voice. Reflective Practice 2: 53–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623940120035523.
Marshall, M. J. and Barritt, L. S. (1990) Choices made, worlds created: The rhetoric of AERJ. American Educational Research Journal 27: 589–609. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1163102.
Murray, D. (1972/2003) Teach writing as a process not a product. The Leaflet 11–14. New England Association of Teachers of English. Reprinted in V. Villanueva (ed.) (2003) Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (2nd edition) 3–6. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Myerhoff, B. and Ruby, J. (1982) Introduction. In J. Ruby (ed.) A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology 1–35. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Olson Beal, H. (2008) Speaking the language of desegregation: A case study of South Boulevard Foreign Language Academic Immersion Magnet. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Louisiana State University.
Richardson, L. (1997) Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Spivey, N. N. (1997) The Constructivist Metaphor: Reading, Writing and the Making of Meaning. San Diego: Academic Press.
Weese, K. L. (1999) Learning from students: An approach to teaching beginning college writers. In K. L. Weese, S. L. Fox and S. Greene (eds.) Teaching Academic Literacy: The Uses of Teacher-research in Developing a Writing Program 3–19. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
