Identity & Written Discourse - How to Maintain Personal Identity in Academic Writings

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𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲 & 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 - 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬
Identity is as much an issue in written discourse as it is in spoken discourse. This is particularly the case in student academic writing. Hyland ( 2002 c) discusses the view that is often presented to students that academic writing is faceless, impersonal discourse. Students are told, he says, ‘to leave their personalities at the door’ when they write and not use personal pronouns such as ‘I’ which show what is being said is the student’s view or place in things. As Hyland ( 2002 c: 352) argues, ‘almost everything we write says something about us and the sort of relationship that we want to set up with our readers’. Indeed, one of the ways that expert academic writers do this, in some academic disciplines at least, is using the pronoun ‘I’.
Establishing writer identity is, however, something that is often difficult for second language writers. This is often complicated by students bringing a different writer's voice’ from their first language setting to the second language writing situation (Fox 1994 ). Students may come from backgrounds where they have considerable standing in their field of study and find it difficult to be told they need to take on the voice of a novice academic writer and hide their point of view, as they write in their second language. Hirvela and Belcher ( 2001 ) argue that teachers need to know more about the ways students present themselves in their first language writing and about their first language and culture identities so they can help students deal with the issue of identity in their second language writing