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Annual Review of Applied Linguistics,35 (2015), pp. 140–159.
© Cambridge University Press, 2015
doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000178
Identity in Written Discourse
Paul Kei Matsuda
Arizona State University
pmatsuda@asu.edu
abstract
This article provides an overview of theoretical and research issues in the study of
writer identity in written discourse. First, a historical overview explores how identity
has been conceived, studied, and taught, followed by a discussion of how writer iden-
tity has been conceptualized. Next, three major orientations toward writer identity
show how the focus of analysis has shifted from the individual to the social conven-
tions and how it has been moving toward an equilibrium, in which the negotiation of
individual and social perspectives is recognized. The next two sections discuss two
of the key developments—identity in academic writing and the assessment of writer
identity. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications and future
directions for teaching and researching identity in written discourse.
introduction
Identity has become an important consideration in the study of written discourse. In
the early years of written discourse analysis and language teaching, identity did not
receive much attention partly because the application of written discourse analysis
focused primarily on academic writing instruction in a limited range of classroom
genres, and the pragmatic goal of helping writers conform to the native-speaker
norm was widely accepted. Many of the assumptions that motivated the study and
teaching of written discourse have changed over the years, however. The use of
the native-speaker norm as the benchmark for language analysis or instruction has
been problematized (see, e.g., the debate between Carter & McCarthy, 1996, and
Prodromou, 1996a,1996b), and many corpus researchers have begun to incorporate
proficient users of the genre regardless of the language background (e.g., Hyland,
2000). The globalization and diversification of languages have also come to be
widely acknowledged, and the need to negotiate individual and social variations
in writing has become an important consideration (Matsuda & Matsuda, 2010),
although the impact of these changes on written discourse—especially academic
writing—is not always visible (Belcher, 2009; Fløttum, 2012). The modernist
conceptions of identity and language have also been widely critiqued, opening up
new space for the consideration of dynamic and multiple identity constructions
and their implications in academic (Hyland, 2012a; Hyland & Sancho Guinda,
2012; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) and professional (Beason,
2001) contexts as well as in digital discourses (DePew & Miller-Cochran, 2010;
Hewings, 2012; Hyland, 2012a;Lam,2000; Matsuda, 2001,2002;Yi,2007,2010).
140
identity in written discourse 141
Identity in written discourse is a complex phenomenon that involves both em-
pirical reality that can be described and measured (e.g., demographics and textual
features) and phenomenological reality that exists in people’s perceptions (e.g.,
social constructs). In understanding identity in written discourse, it is important to
distinguish between the identity positions of the writer that is external to discourse,
such as the demographic information (e.g., Shen, 1989; Cox, Jordan, Ortmeier-
Hooper, & Schwartz, 2010), and identity as constructed and negotiated through
discourse, which is captured by concepts such as ethos and voice. Although these
two aspects of identity are inextricably tied to each other, this article is mainly con-
cerned with the latter—contemporary approaches to identity in written discourse
not as the material reality (essentialized self) projected through writing but as a
social construct that is mediated by written discourse. In other words, identity does
not just reside in the text. It is not simply the sum of its parts—textual features—
either. Rather, it is a social construct created in the complex interaction among
various elements of writing (Silva, 1990), including the relationship between the
writer and the reader, who interact through the text in a particular situational context
(Hyland, 2008a; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007). As such, studying identity in written
discourse requires not just an understanding of textual features but the perceptions
and experiences of identity both by writers and readers.
historical background
One of the major strands of the study of identity in written discourse is rooted
in ancient rhetoric. The institutionalization of first-year writing requirement and
the development of the field of rhetoric and composition in the mid-20th century
facilitated the rise of “new rhetoric” (Enos & Brown, 1992) as a disciplinary
foundation for the study of written discourse production in North American higher
education. While rhetoric since antiquity was mainly concerned with the study of
persuasive speech—especially in legal, political, and religious contexts—many of
the concepts from classical rhetoric were adapted as heuristics for college-level
writing instruction (Corbett, 1965; Lunsford & Ede, 1984). Among the rhetorical
precepts that found application in the study and teaching of identity in writing
was the Aristotle’s notion of ethos, which “is concerned with the character of the
speaker”—defined in terms of wisdom (phronesis), moral character (arete), and
good will (eunoia)—“as portrayed in the speech itself” (Cherry, 1988, p. 253).
The notion of ethos was taken up by Connor (1990; Connor & Lauer, 1985,1988),
who sought to integrate perspectives from text linguistics and rhetorical analysis.
Beason (2001) examined how errors in written discourse contribute to business
executives’ judgments of the writer as a writer, as a business person, and as an
organization representative. More recently, Gross and Chesley (2012) examined
the role of ethos in medical research articles.
Another concept that has been playing a key role in the exploration of identity
in written discourse is voice. Gross and Chesley (2012) characterized Aristotelian
ethos as “the origin of stance and voice as objects of scholarly inquiry” (p. 86), but
this claim needs to be examined carefully for historical accuracy. Although ethos
142 paul kei matsuda
and voice have evolved into similar concepts over the years, and although it is
likely that the evolution of voice was influenced by ethos and other conceptions of
writer identities in some ways, it would not be accurate to say that voice originated
from ethos. Both ethos and voice began to enter the shared lexis of North American
writing teachers in the mid-1960s and, at least initially, ethos was a much more
social and interpersonal construct than the early conception of voice, the develop-
ment of which will be discussed next. Over the last five decades, ethos and voice
developed in parallel to one another; voice was favored by writing teachers who
focused on genres that draw on personal knowledge, while ethos was the term of
choice among rhetorically minded writing specialists with a focus on persuasive
writing in academic, professional, and public contexts.
The notion of voice has evolved considerably over the last four decades. It
initially emerged as a rather intuitive, metaphorical application of physical voice,
which is unique to each individual and can be used for identification. As such, it
focused on the unique individual quality in writing, which was considered to be an
expression of authentic self (Coles, 1988;Elbow,1968; Macrorie, 1970;Stewart,
1969). An underlying assumption behind this early conception of voice was that
writer’s identity existed in the material reality external to discourse, and that iden-
tity was being projected through discourse. In this conception of writer identity
as projected self, honesty, or the accuracy of self-representation, was an important
concern, and some writing teachers and researchers emphasized the presence of
authentic self as the sine qua non of good writing (Coles & Vopat, 1985). In this
view, identity can be discussed and assessed in terms of its presence or absence, as
well as the authenticity of self-representation. Although early proponents of voice
continued to develop the notion by recognizing the multiplicity and constructed
nature of voice (Elbow, 1981,2007), early definitions of voice continue to be in-
fluential perhaps because of their intuitive appeal. As Jeffery (2011) documented
in her study of high school teachers, some teachers continued to value authenticity
of voice in student writing.
By the late 1980s, the critique of modernist conceptions of self as singu-
lar, coherent, and static was already in full swing (Faigley, 1989; Hashimoto,
1987), and the late 1990s saw another wave of publications that problematized
the individualistic assumptions in the notion of voice as practiced in writing text-
books and instructional practices (Bowden, 1999; Harris, 1997; Ramanathan &
Atkinson, 1999; Ramanathan & Kaplan, 1996). Associating the notion of voice
with the ideology of Western individualism, Ramanathan and Kaplan (1996)ar-
gued that the concept of individual voice prevalent in U.S. composition class-
rooms is “difficult for mainstream students” and “even more problematic for stu-
dents from non-US cultures” (p. 22). They explained that the notion of voice
is “largely culturally constrained” and “relatively inaccessible to students who
are not full participants in the culture within which they are asked to write”
(p. 22). Pursuing a similar line of argument, Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999)
also critiqued the notion of voice in the context of L2 writing classrooms, count-
ing it among the “principles and practices of US university writing pedagogy in
which the ideology of individualism appears to be strongly, if tacitly, implicated”
(p. 46).
identity in written discourse 143
Arguments against voice are also based on an earlier conceptions of voice as
the expression of individuality. The critics of voice are not necessarily unaware
of the various definitions of it. For instance, Ramanathan and Atkinson (1999)
acknowledged the presence of various conceptions of voice, including authentic
voice (Stewart, 1972), situational voice (Ede, 1989), and intertextual voice (Yancey,
1994). Similarly, Stapleton (2002) prominently mentioned a Bakhtinian conception
of voice (Wertsch, 1991), and both Stapleton (2002) and Helms-Park and Stapleton
(2003) cited sources that take a broader perspective, encompassing both individual
and social dimensions of voice (Ivaniˇc, 1998; Ivaniˇc&Camps,2001; Matsuda,
2001;Prior,2001).
defining identity in written discourse
Defining identity in written discourse has not been an easy task because the con-
ception of voice has evolved drastically over the last few decades and because the
shift has been a gradual and layered process, with multiple definitions coexisting.
Recognizing the multiplicity of definitions, Petri´c(2010) interviewed 30 master’s
degree students in gender studies at a university in Central Europe to identify how
those students defined voice. Petri´c found that students expressed varied views,
ranging from individual voice and writers’ choices to interactions with other voices.
Jeffery (2011) examined how U.S. secondary school teachers conceptualized voice
by interviewed 19 teachers using a think-aloud-protocol method. The teachers
associated students’ voice to features such as tone, diction, specificity, sentence
structure, coherence, and development. The teachers also associated voice with
intentionality of the writer, using terms such as “‘choice,’ ‘control,’ ‘command,’
and ‘deliberate’” (p. 108). They also considered voice to contribute to the strength
as well as weaknesses of the text.
Despite the existence of various definitions of voice, contemporary definitions
in the published literature seem to be converging. Ivaniˇc(1998) provides a useful,
overarching framework for understanding identity in writing. Ivaniˇc posits four
aspects of writer identity: “autobiographical self,” “discoursal self,” “self as au-
thor,” and “possibilities for self-hood” (p. 23). Since this is a complex idea that is
often misunderstood, it warrants some detailed discussion.
The autobiographical self refers to the writer’s sense of self—“a writer’s sense
of their roots, of where they are coming from”—which is socially constructed
(p. 24). Ivaniˇc describes this aspect of self in terms of Goffman’s notion of a per-
former who brings previous life experiences and social positions to the performance
of self. Ivaniˇc also compares the autobiographical self to Bourdieu’s (1977) notion
of “habitus” or “a person’s disposition to behave in certain ways” (Ivaniˇc, 1998,
p. 24). For example, my autobiographical self in writing this chapter involves,
among other things, what I have read and heard about identity in written dis-
course, my disciplinary backgrounds in both applied linguistics and rhetoric and
composition, my previous experience in presenting and discussing ideas about
identity in writing, and my interest and experience in historiography.
144 paul kei matsuda
The discoursal self refers to the impression that is created through the features
of written discourse, which is also referred to as voice (Ivaniˇc, 1998; Matsuda,
2001). This idea, which corresponds with Goffman’s notion of character that is
portrayed as a result of the writer’s performance, is at the heart of voice in written
discourse. In this article, I am constructing the voice of an academic writer in
the field of applied linguistics, by drawing on certain discursive features that are
associated with academic articles in the field, such as nominalization, use of hedges
and boosters, reporting verbs, APA style citations, self-mention, and so on. The
impression is also created through nondiscursive features, such as the choice of
topic, the points of emphasis in the discussion, and the attention to historical details.
These choices are informed by my authobiographical self, but it is also a result
of deliberate decisions to construct myself in the eyes of the intended readers—
applied linguistics with varying degree of interest and experience with the research
on identity in written discourse. It is also important to point out that some of the
impressions that you as a reader have from your reading of this piece may be quite
unexpected, based on some inadvertent choices on my part.
The self as author, an aspect of the discoursal self, is the sense of being the
author that the writer perceives and projects in written discourse. This idea is
similar to what Foucault (1977) calls “author-function” (p. 125). It is a sense of
authorial identity that the writer develops and is perceived by the readers. The
same piece of writing may be valued and assessed differently depending on the
level of confidence and authority that is projected by the writer and perceived by
the reader. The authorial identity also creates more room for negotiating discourse
conventions, as readers are more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the
author if they believe that the author is an accomplished writer. Williams (1981),
for example, has demonstrated that readers tend to overlook obvious errors in
articles that are published in a prestigious journal. My authorial self in this article
is derived in part from the explicit and implicit references to my previous work on
this topic as well as the status of ARAL as a by-invitation-only publication.
As Ivaniˇc makes clear, these aspects of writer identity are neither completely
discrete nor mutually exclusive. They are also both enabled and constrained by
the possibilities for self-hood, socially available identity options and discursive
resources. The notion of possibilities for self-hood resonates with Gee’s (1990)
notion of “‘Discourse’ with a big ‘D’” as an “identity kit” (p. 142). That is, Dis-
course is not just a set of textual features but it embodies socially shared assump-
tions and practices that allow people to construct their identity or ways of being in
society. Those resources may include various discourse features and argumentative
strategies from various genres that enable the writer to construct a sense of identity
appropriate for the situation.
Matsuda (2001), building on Ivaniˇc(1998) and Johnstone (1996), defines dis-
cursively constructed identity in written discourse, or voice, as “the amalgama-
tive effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language
users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet ever-changing
repertoire” (p. 40). Like Hatch, Hill, and Hayes (1993), who examined how
readers form impressions about the writers’ personalities, and like Rubin and
identity in written discourse 145
Williams-James (1997), who investigated the effects of perceived nationality of the
writer on the reader’s evaluation of the text, Matsuda’s (2001) definition of voice as
the effect recognizes the role of the reader as well as the writer and the text. In this
definition, voice is a phenomenological concept; the writer’s discursive identity—
which is created by the writer’s choices and the textual manifestations of those
choices—is ultimately perceived by the reader. This definition also accounts for
the indexicality of various features of the text in creating social meaning (Bucholtz
& Hall, 2005; Davila, 2012), thus putting into perspective feature-based definitions
of various aspects of writer identity. In addition to language and discourse features,
this definition also takes into consideration nondiscursive features such as docu-
ment design and visual elements such as images, video, and even sound effects that
are integrated into multimedia texts. This phenomenological conception of voice
as effect (see also Hashimoto, 1987; Yeh, 1998) suggests that a full understanding
of identity requires the consideration of the writer, the text, the reader, and their
interactions. In other words, the writer’s identity does not singularly reside in the
writer, the text, or the reader; rather, identity is part of the interpersonal meaning
that is negotiated through the interaction among the writer and the reader mediated
by the text.
It is important to note, however, that not all of these elements have to be exam-
ined in a single study. It is useful to examine each of these elements separately in or-
der to understand how they contribute to the construction and negotiation of voice,
although these elements are contributing factors and not voice itself. In applied
linguistics, which has a strong tradition of describing textual features and func-
tions, many researchers have focused on one of the elements of writer identity—
that is, textual functions and features that contribute to the construction of writer
identity (i.e., textual realizations of identity). Textual functions that are associated
with the expression of writer identity in the text include appraisal (Hood, 2012;
Martin, 2000; Martin & White, 2005), evaluation (Hunston & Thompson, 2000),
judgment (Coffin, 2002), stance (Biber & Finegan, 1989; Conrad & Biber, 2000;
Gray & Biber, 2012; Hyland, 2012b), intensity (Labov, 1984), and posture (Grabe,
1984). Hyland (2008a) proposed a model of identity-in-interaction or positioning
in terms of two key constructs: stance and engagement. Hyland defined stance as
“community recognized personality, an attitudinal, writer-oriented function which
concerns the ways writers present themselves and convey their judgments, opin-
ions and comments” (p. 7). Hyland identified three main components of stance as
evidentiality (Chafe, 1986), affect (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1989), and presence, which
is materialized with features such as hedges,boosters,attitude markers, and self-
mention (Hyland, 2008a). Engagement, an aspect of audience awareness, is “more
of an alignment function, concerning the ways that writers rhetorically recognise
the presence of their readers to actively pull them along with the argument, include
them as discourse participants, and guide them to interpretations” (Hyland, 2008a,
p. 7). Engagement is marked by such features as reader pronouns,personal asides,
references to sharedness,directives, and questions (Hyland, 2008a, p. 11).
Text-oriented definitions of voice are useful in identifying and describing
how identity is manifested or constructed through textual features, thus making
146 paul kei matsuda
available some of the discursive repertoire. Yet, an understanding of identity is
not complete without a consideration of the writer’s choices as well as the read-
ers’ perceptions that is triggered by various discursive and nondiscursive features
(Matsuda, 2001; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007; Sancho Guinda, 2012; Tardy & Matsuda,
2009). Contemporary definitions of discursively constructed identity resonate with
the dialogic and sociohistoric view of voice (Bakhtin, 1981;Prior,2001; Voloshi-
nov, 1973; Wertsch, 1991), as well as the notion of language as meaning making
resources (Halliday, 1978). All of them have come to share a number of key
assumptions, including the following:
rIdentity is not optional; all texts says something about the writer, although some are
more marked than others.
rIdentity is multiple and dynamic.
rIdentity is constructed through socially shared resources for meaning making.
rIdentity is both individual and social.
As Prior (2001) pointed out, however, there has been a tendency to dichotomize
individual and social voice. As with any major shifts, the recognition of constructed
identity have sometimes led to the blind acceptance of the social perspective and a
dismissal of individual voice—by delimiting the scope of consideration to transac-
tional (Britton, 1971) or referential (Kinneavy, 1980) genres. To fully understand
the complexity of the tension between individual and social perspectives, it would
be useful to explore the how different conceptions of writer identity fall along the
epistemological continuum between two extreme positions: the subjective, indi-
vidualist position that valorize writer’s individuality and agency, and the objective,
social-constructionist position that denies agency for the writer (Matsuda, 2011;
seealsoTardy,2012).
personal and social-constructionist
orientations
On one end of the continuum is the personal orientation, a traditional concep-
tion of voice that sees voice as an expression of unique individuality. Voloshinov
(1973) called this position “individualistic subjectivism,” which “sees language as
generative activity; sees creative, meaningful speech acts of the individual as the
heart of language; and sees the readymade system of language as ‘the inert crust,
the hardened lava of language creativity’ (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 48)” (as quoted
in Prior, 2001, p. 58). This orientation emphasizes writing as authentic individual
expression, which is best learned implicitly, rather than through explicit study
of language features. Identity is not a teachable construct because everyone has a
distinct identity and the only person who can discover it is the writer. In a sense, stu-
dents are expected to learn to write by writing. Voice in this definition comes from
within the individual and is achieved by writing on personal topics and by resisting
the constraints of the genre conventions. The individualist perspective sees voice
identity in written discourse 147
to be emerging from the sense of self that each person has, and this perspective
is facilitated when writing in personal genres or on personal topics. An extreme
version of this perspective may resist social conventions as constraints even though
the use of language requires the use of social conventions. This perspective may
also see the organization of discourse as something that is organically developed
as the writer discovers his or her identity and meaning; yet, this perspective fails
to account for the regularity that is observed in the resulting texts. The assessment
of voice in this view is based on the presence of the sense of individual; the goal
of teaching voice is to achieve the state of markedness in discourse, which is often
described as unique, original, or authentic. This orientation tends to be associated
with creative nonfiction genres such as autobiography, memoir, and personal essay.
The other end of the continuum is the social-constructionist orientation, which
may or may not acknowledge the possibility or desirability of individual voice
but focuses more on the adoption of socially accepted and frequently occurring
features. Voloshinov (1973) calls this position “abstract objectivism” that “views
language as a readymade stable system of normatively identical forms, as an
autonomous domain, a closed system independent of ideological and cognitive
systems” (as quoted in Prior, 2001, p. 59). This orientation focuses on functional
relationships between language use and socially constructed goals for communica-
tion in writing instruction. Voice in this view is achieved by acquiring the means for
occupying socially sanctioned identity positions; genre, therefore, is an enabling
force, while individual differences are considered to be a source of distraction. Al-
though this perspective is useful in identifying and providing discursive resources
for novice writers, it often focuses on normative language use while overlooking
variations across individuals and over time. The assessment of voice in this view
is based on the absence of marked variations or anomalies; the goal of teaching
voice, if it is taught at all, is to achieve the state of unmarkedness in discourse,
which is often described as “appropriate” usage.
Researchers who occupy individualist and social-constructionist perspectives
have tended to see themselves at odds with each other; the former is considered
to be important for personal writing, while the latter is deemed more appropriate
in academic and professional contexts. Occupying the space between these two
extreme positions is a more recent conception of voice, a social-constructivist view.
Influenced in part by a sociocultural view of language (Bakhtin, 1981; Voloshinov,
1973; Wertsch, 1991), this view of voice accounts for both individual and social
nature of voice by recognizing how individuality and social conventions are both
mutually constitutive and inevitable (Ivaniˇc, 1998; Matsuda, 2001;Prior,2001). In
other words, all utterances rely on the discursive resources provided by previous
utterances, and while each utterance is unique because it responds to a unique
context, it also influences future utterances by becoming part of the discursive
resources. It is also sociohistoric in recognizing variations across time and contexts
(Atkinson, 1999;Prior,2001).
Caught in the individual–social dichotomy that exists in the minds of teach-
ers and researchers, however, the subtle yet important distinction between
social-constructionist and social-constructivist views often gets lost (Matsuda &
148 paul kei matsuda
Bommarito, in press; Tardy, 2012). Those who take a more personal orientation,
on the one hand, may conflate social constructivism with social constructionism—
perhaps because it posits that individuality is socially constructed. On the other
hand, those who lean toward the constructionist end of the continuum may mis-
take constructivism for individualism—perhaps because it recognizes individual
agency in negotiating conventions. For this reason, a further explanation of the dis-
tinction between social constructionism and social constructivism might be useful.
social-constructionist and
social-constructivist orientations
In general, social constructionism is a sociological concept that describes how
a group of individuals develop a socially shared set of assumptions, artifacts,
and practices (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). This perspective is highly compatible
with descriptive studies of discourse that seek to identify patterns in discourse use.
Social-constructionist descriptions of discourse tend not to emphasize how individ-
ual writers make decisions as they integrate various socially available repertoire,
and pedagogical applications of social-constructionist descriptions of discourse
features have tended to focus on making social conventions available for adoption
while paying less attention to individual agency in appropriating, resisting, or
negotiating those conventions.
This is not to say that there is no agency in following socially sanctioned con-
ventions; writers can choose to conform in order to gain access or to avoid standing
out. Yet, there is a difference between choosing to use certain conventionalized
forms, which is agentive, as opposed to using them because the writer does not
know otherwise. In other words, social constructionism sees the locus of agency to
be in successful communication, while social constructivism sees the loci of agency
in both successful communication and in negotiating the tools. This is analogous
to the difference between successfully conducting an empirical study by adopting
a method from a previous study and successfully conducting an empirical study
while also proposing a methodological innovation, which might eventually be
integrated into conventionalized use.
Pedagogical practices that are based on the extreme view of constructionism—
that is, teaching only the dominant practices within a single genre—may be ap-
propriate in preparing students for highly predictable situations, but not for un-
usual rhetorical situations or for different or new task environments; the difference
is comparable to that between training and education. Furthermore, the social-
constructionist orientation tends to reify the established conventions by encour-
aging language users to follow them (based on the frequency of occurrences)
while implicitly or explicitly discouraging deviations from the perceived norm,
even though deviations are a natural and inevitable part of human language use
(Johnstone, 1996).
In contrast, social constructivism is a psychological concept that refers to the
process of taking socially available artifacts and making meaning with them
identity in written discourse 149
(Vygotsky, 1978). Like its social-constructionist counterpart, the social-
constructivist view of voice takes the formation of social conventions into consid-
eration; yet, unlike the social-constructionist perspective, the social-constructivist
perspective focuses not only on how social norms arise and become stabilized
but also on how individuals shape the form and meaning by using the tools pro-
vided by the norms—or socially available discursive repertoire. In other words,
the social-constructivist perspective is concerned with how the social conventions
are appropriated by individual writers as they respond to the particular rhetorical
situation in the process of writing, while at the same time influencing the evolving
conventions.
Another important yet subtle difference among these three conceptions of voice
is the locus of voice itself: The personal orientation to identity tends to locate voice
in the writer; social-constructionist orientation tends to seek voice in the text; and
the social-constructivist theories of voice seek voice in the perceived reality that
results from the text-mediated interaction between the writer and the reader. In this
view, individual users contribute to the creation of social conventions, and social
conventions help individuals create meaning (Matsuda, 1997).
As Tardy (2012) has explained, these three views on voice are perspectives, and
they are not essentially tied to any individual researcher or teacher; in fact, teachers
and researchers often advocate one position but slip into another. Proponents of
individual voice have incorporated many of the assumptions that are associated
with more social orientations (Elbow, 2007). Text-based approaches to the study
of identity also seem to be shifting from social-constructionist to constructivist
orientation (Hyland, 2010,2012a). In other words, the pendulum is now moving
toward equilibrium.
identity in academic writing
In the study of written discourse, academic writing has been the dominant focus of
analysis, perhaps because its relevance is obvious and because it tends to be familiar
and accessible to researchers. While identity had been an important consideration in
North American writing studies since the 1960s, descriptions of written discourse
in applied linguistics have tended not to include consideration of writer identity.
Writing and Identity by Roz Ivaniˇc(1998) was among the first to articulate the
role of identity in academic writing (see also Clark & Ivaniˇc, 1997). In Disciplinary
Discourses, Ken Hyland (2000) also helped to call attention to the importance of
interpersonal meaning in shaping interactions in academic writing genres, paving
the way for studies of social identity in academic writing. Yet, because of the
prevalence of the traditional, individualistic view of voice and identity, the study
of identity in academic writing did not take off as a major focus of research, and as
soon as the discussion began, it was met with some resistance. In 2001, when the
Journal of Second Language Writing published a special issue on voice (Belcher
& Hirvela, 2001), it was immediately followed by a strong argument against voice
in academic writing research. Stapleton (2002) argued that the place of voice was
150 paul kei matsuda
overstated in the professional literature and called for a shift of emphasis to topics
that were more important for academic writing, such as ideas and argument. Helms-
Park and Stapleton (2003) also raised questions about the importance of voice in
the context of academic essays in college-level writing classrooms. Some of these
arguments seem to reflect the strong emphasis on academic writing in the study and
teaching of written discourse. While it is an important emphasis, written discourse
exists outside of academic contexts, and theories of identity need to account for
more than what is relevant in academic contexts.
Somewhat ironically, Stapleton’s (2002) plea to redirect research efforts from
identity to ideas seems to have motivated researchers to focus even more on
voice and identity in academic writing, demonstrating the relevance of identity
in academic writing. Stapleton himself contributed to this effort by conducting a
collaborative study to examine the relationship between voice and writing quality
(Helms-Park & Stapleton, 2003). The study was later replicated by Zhao and Llosa
(2008).
Matsuda and Tardy (2007) investigated how readers construct the image of the
author in a simulated double-blind manuscript review process. They found that
readers do think about the author’s identity and that their images of the author
were triggered by both discursive and nondiscursive features of the text. These
findings were confirmed in a follow-up study. Tardy and Matsuda (2009) surveyed
the perceptions of editorial board members for several international journals to
see whether and how they consider the author’s voice. Aspects of writer’s identity
that editorial board members considered included, in the order of frequency, field
experience, disciplinary background, language background, nationality, gender,
institutional affiliation, level of education, ethnic background, and age. The fea-
tures of the manuscript that triggered the editorial board members’ construction
of author voice included both discursive features (e.g., signs of author’s language
background, sentence structures, careful editing, and writing style) and nondiscur-
sive features (e.g., breadth and depth of knowledge, topic choice, representation of
the field, description of the research setting, theoretical framework, and research
method).
Hyland (2008a) also examined voice in academic discourse as manifested in
textual features and functions. Focusing on an aspect of voice—the writer’s po-
sitioning in social interaction—Hyland described how the writer’s stance and au-
dience engagement were manifested in a corpus of 240 research articles in eight
disciplines: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, marketing, philoso-
phy, sociology, applied linguistics, physics, and microbiology. He argued that “all
writing has ‘voice’ and that it is an integral aspect of self-representation in academic
discourse.” In another study, Hyland (2008b,2010) examined individual identity
in academic contexts through the analysis of two corpora of academic publications
by Deborah Cameron and John Swales. He concluded that “identity is, at least in
part, constituted through our consistent language choices” (Hyland, 2010, p. 181;
see also Johnstone, 1996; Matsuda, 2001). Hyland (2012a) extended these studies
and examined how academic identity is constructed in relation to their disciplinary
affiliations.
identity in written discourse 151
Studies of identity in academic writing have been expanded to include a wide
variety of academic genres. Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres,avol-
ume edited by Hyland and Sancho Guinda (2012), featured descriptions of stance
and voice in such genres as research articles (Gross & Chesley, 2012; Hood, 2012;
Silver, 2012), academic bios (Hyland, 2012a;Tse,2012), textbooks (Bondi, 2012),
PhD theses (Thompson, 2012), graph commentaries (Sancho Guinda, 2012),
email (Hewings, 2012; Matsuda, 2002), blogs (Hewings, 2012), websites (Hy-
land, 2012a), and book reviews (Salger-Meyer, Alcaraz Ariza, & Luzardo Briceño,
2012).
identity and writing assessment
In some educational contexts, such as U.S. secondary schools, identity, particularly
voice, has been deeply ingrained in writing assessment practices for many years
(Matsuda & Jeffery, 2012). Jeffery (2007) documented that the notion of voice
appears in the learning objectives of 96% of the states. Jeffery (2009) also analyzed
40 rubrics used for high school writing assessment and found that 50% of them
included voice as a criterion. The conceptions of voice in these rubrics, however,
is not always consistent. Jeffery (2010) analyzed the 20 rubrics that included voice
and found that 10 of them included voice as a category of its own, while the
rest of them combined voice with other categories such as style, language use,
and written expression. In many cases, the conception of voice in also shifted
from personal to social-constructionist to social-constructivist within individual
teachers and rubrics. National Writing project Analytic Writing Continuum tried
to avoid the heavy reliance on personal view of voice by replacing with voice with
stance (DiPardo, Storms, & Selland, 2011), which gets at an aspect of voice but
does not quite capture the larger conception of voice.
Matsuda and Jeffery (2012) documented the conspicuous absence of voice from
standardized writing assessment rubrics (i.e., IELTS, TOEFL iBT, SAT) and the
ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs, Zinkgraf, Wormuth, Hartfiel, & Hughey, 1981),
which are commonly used in U.S. higher education for admission, placement, and
even outcomes assessment. In contrast, they pointed out that 50% of states used
rubrics that included voice as a category or as part of descriptors (Jeffery, 2010),
and that U.S. secondary school teachers and students valued voice, though their
definitions varied widely (Beck, 2006;Jeffery,2009; Llosa, Beck, & Zhao, 2011).
They also pointed out that the Writing Programs Outcomes Statement—nationwide
guidelines for first-year composition programs developed by the Council of Writ-
ing Program Administrators (2014)—included voice as one of the desired out-
comes of writing instruction. In other words, there is a gap between what is valued
by students and teachers, and what is measured by writing assessment rubrics.
This gap may be attributed partially to the difficulty of operationalizing identity.
Because identity in writing is situated not just in the text itself but in the larger
context of immediate interaction, it defies easy codification. Even with the diffi-
culties, it is important to account for the place of identity in assessing the quality of
152 paul kei matsuda
writing because the perceived identity of the writer does play a role in how readers
evaluate and act on a piece of writing (Faigley, 1989; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;
Tardy & Matsuda, 2009), and if left unspecified, may unduly influence the scores.
As Haswell (2005) has pointed out, the outcome of writing assessment depends
on what is measured or not measured.
The perceived identity or voice does seem to influence writing assessment,
although not always in ways that is expected. Rubin and Williams-James (1997)
examined the relationship between the nationality of the writer as perceived by the
readers and its impact on the rating of the overall quality of writing. The researchers
led the raters to believe the student essay they were reading was written either by
a Southeast Asian, Northern European, or U.S. native English speaker, and they
found that the raters assigned significantly higher scores when they believed it was
an essay written by a Southeast Asian student than when they thought it was written
by a native English speaker from the United States. This study seems to highlight
the phenomenological nature of writing assessment (see also Williams, 1981).
There have been a number of attempts to develop rubrics that incorporate the
notion of voice. Recognizing the role of Aristotelian rhetorical proof in writing
assessment as well as the teachers’ conceptions of voice in secondary school set-
tings, Yeh (1998) sought to develop an analytic rubric that incorporated credibility
and affective appeal. The definition, however, focused on a personal conception
of voice as “fresh, vivid, honest expression of one’s opinions” (p. 128). The de-
scriptors used for voice also pose some problems because different criteria are at
play at different levels. The lowest level is described as “no voice (credibility or
emotional appeal),” while the rest of the levels are assessed in terms of maturity
or immaturity of voice, “defined as: appropriate, sophisticated, audience-centered,
vivid language filled with conviction.” Furthermore, “no voice” is considered to
be less effective than “extremely immature voice” (p. 140).
Helms-Park and Stapleton (2003) developed what theycalled t he Voice Intensity
Rating Scale, in an attempt to capture a few textual functions and features that are
associated with voice in the discussion of voice in some of the research publi-
cations. The criteria used in this scale includes assertiveness, self-identification,
reiteration of the central point, and authorial presence and autonomy of thought.
The first two, assertiveness and self-identification, are based on linguistic features
at the sentence level, such as hedges, intensifiers, and first-person pronouns. The
third and fourth criteria, reiteration of central point and authorial presence and
autonomy of thought, are designed to account for the “overall presence of the
author’s voice and to account for the intangible quality of identity in writing.” It is
important to note that, given the purpose of the study—to examine the relevance of
the current discussion of voice to the college-level writing classroom—the Voice
Intensity Rating Scale was not a comprehensive measure of voice but a way of
operationalizing individual voice as represented in the existing literature.
Some studies have also investigated the relationship between identity-related
constructs and the assessment of overall writing quality. Connor (1990) examined
the relationship between the amount of ethos (credibility appeal) and the overall
holistic rating of an argumentative text. Although Connor did not find a correlation,
identity in written discourse 153
Yeh (1998) later pointed out that “the strength of credibility and affective appeals
is a qualitative, rather than quantitative issue, since overreliance on either appeal
detracts from an argument’s persuasiveness” (p. 128). In a validation study of
an analytic rubric, Yeh found a positive correlation between voice and content
development.
Helms-Park and Stapleton (2003) compared the scores of Voice Intensity Rating
Scale with the overall quality of writing measured by ESL Composition Profile
(Jacobs et al., 1981), one of the most widely used L2 writing assessment rubrics.
They did not find a significant correlation between voice and overall effectiveness.
The lack of correlation, however, may have been due to different constructs being
assessed by the two rubrics; the ESL Composition Profile does not include a voice-
related criterion. In fact, Zhao and Llosa (2008) conducted a partial replication
study of Helms-Park and Stapleton (2003) by comparing the scores obtained with
the Voice Intensity Rating Scale with those from a holistic rubric that included
voice as one of the criteria, and found that the scores were significantly correlated.
These rubrics may be useful in measuring a more traditional, personal concep-
tion of voice to some extent. Yet, these constructs do not capture the social nature
of voice adequately, nor do they account for features such as ideas and argumen-
tative strategies that cannot be identified with the analysis of textual structures
and functions. More recently, Zhao (2012) developed an analytical rubric for the
assessment of voice strength in argumentative writing based on a mixed method
involving the analysis of 400 writing samples and qualitative analyses of four
raters’ think-aloud and interview data. This rubric considers that voice is realized
through the clarity of ideas, presentation of ideas, and writer and reader presence.
The social-constructivist view of writer identity poses challenges to the devel-
opment of rubrics because identity does not reside entirely in the text; instead, it
exists in the interaction between writers and readers that is mediated by the text
(Hyland, 2012a; Matsuda, 2001; Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;Prior,2001). Even though
there are raters in writing assessment, the rubric that uses constructs that do not
account for identity factors or those that adopt purely text-based definitions do not
account for identity-related issues (Faigley, 1989; Rubin & Williams-James, 1997).
Furthermore, as Jeffery (2011) points out, the social-constructivist view does not
automatically assign positive or negative values to markedness or unmarkedness
in the text; instead, it values the “critical awareness” (Ivaniˇc&Camps,2001,p.
3) of the “linkages of institutional position and audience to discursive identity”
(Prior, 2001, p. 76).
implications for teaching and research
Presence and honesty in self-representation is indeed relevant in some genres, such
as memoir, autobiography, and academic authors’ biographical statements, as well
as political campaign ads and job application letters. Identity, however, is not just
a matter of asserting one’s own individuality or conforming to socially sanctioned
identity positions. The consideration of genres that emphasize referential and
154 paul kei matsuda
persuasive functions, which is often the case in academic and professional contexts,
requires a broader conception of genre.
Developing the writer’s identity means become more deliberate in presenting
self by developing a larger repertoire and becoming more aware of the effects of
their own choices. As Zhao and Llosa (2008) aptly put it, “student writers and
writing instructors should always consider … features of voice not as rigid rules
to follow but, instead, as a set of tools that[,] when applied appropriately and in the
right context[,] can help create an effective authorial voice, which subsequently
could help improve the overall quality of a piece of writing” (p. 164). That is,
a successful social-constructivist voice balances markedness and unmarkedness
purposefully and strategically in achieving the particular rhetorical goal; this voice
can be described as “agentive” voice.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that being aware and having a larger
repertoire does not guarantee effective voice. A case study participant in Matsuda
and Tardy (2007), for example, was aware of his own choices and their possible
impact, and he tried to avoid sounding masculine and aggressive in his manuscript.
Yet, the readers’ perceptions defied his intentions—the two blind reviewers iden-
tified the author as male based on what they considered to be characteristics of
male discourse. As Faigley (1989) put it,
No matter how well we teach our students, we cannot confer power as an essential
quality of their makeup. We can, however, teach our students to analyze cultural
definitions of the self, to understand how historically these definitions are created in
discourse, and to recognize how definitions of the self are involved in the configura-
tion of relations of power. (p. 411)
The development of voice, then, may also involve the development of field knowl-
edge and audience awareness as well as an awareness of how self is situated in
complex relations of power.
With the renewed awareness of writer identity among teachers and researchers,
the study of identity in written discourse will continue to be an important agenda in
writing research and instruction. Descriptive studies of various textual features and
functions will no doubt continue, providing important understanding of the role
texts play in the construction and negotiation of writer identity. To understand how
these features and functions interact with various contextual factors, future studies
need to examine identity-related features in a wider range of genres—personal,
academic, professional, and public. It is also important to examine the role of
nondiscursive features, including knowledge and relationships that are represented
in the text as well as visual features. The study of identity also needs to pay greater
attention to the process of identity construction in the context of the interaction
between the writer and reader. Identity is a complex phenomenon, and as such,
research methods and assessment rubrics will also need to reflect the complexity.
identity in written discourse 155
annotated bibliography
Davila, B. (2012). Indexicality and “standard” edited American English: Examining the link be-
tween conceptions of standardness and perceived authorial identity. Written Communication,29(2),
180–207.
This study explores the relationship between the indexicality of textual features—those that are
associated with standard and non-standard edited American English—and the perceived identity
of the writer—particularly the writer’s ethnic background. The researcher interviewed composition
instructors and found that the influence worked both ways—the perception of non-standard textual
features shaped the readers’ perceptions of the author while the perceptions of author’s ethnic back-
ground influenced the readers’ identification of non-standard texts. This study offers an additional
way of exploring author identity that goes beyond the analysis of textual features by highlighting
the reader’s role.
Hyland, K. (2012a). Disciplinary identities: Individuality and community in academic discourse.New
York: Cambridge University Press.
This book explores textual manifestations of writer identity in academic contexts by bringing together
a series of corpus-based studies. Adapting the perspective that identity is constructed through the
negotiation between individuals and social conventions, this book examines textual features are used
to construct writer identity in academic contexts. Using corpora of various academic genres such
as thesis acknowledgments, web pages, biographical statements, undergraduate reports and journal
articles, this study shows individual identity is constructed through the use of various socially shared
conventions.
Hyland, K., & Sancho Guinda, C. (eds.). (2012). Stance and voice in written academic genres.New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
This edited collection brings together represent various theoretical and methodological traditions
to explore two key terms that have come to play an important role in the understanding of identity
in academic writing: stance and voice. It begins with overviews of recent conceptions of stance
and voice, followed by examinations of these concepts in various academic genres—including both
professional and student genres. Professional genres examined in this collection include academic
and medical research articles, biographical statements and textbooks. Student genres include PhD
theses, undergraduate students’ final year reports, student essays, and graph commentaries. The final
section explores variations in stance and voice across various media, disciplines and cultures.
Jeffery, J. V. (2011). Subjectivity, intentionality, and manufactured moves: Teachers’ perceptions of
voice in the evaluation of secondary students’ writing. Research in the Teaching of English,46(1),
92–127.
This study examined how voice, an aspect of writer identity, is manifested in writing assessment,
focusing on how students’ identity was constructed in secondary-levelwriting teachers’ assessment of
student writing. The researcher conducted a series of interviews with nine secondary school teachers
as they read narrative and expository texts, and identified which textual features were associated with
voice and how those perceptions varied across genres and individual readers. The results suggested
the importance of writer’s intentionality as perceived by the readers, which is associated with literary
description and appraisal features that amplify the subjectivity of the writer.
Matsuda, P. K., & Tardy, C. M. (2007). Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author
identity in blind manuscript review. English for Specific Purposes,26, 235–249.
Drawing on Matsuda’s (2001) definition of voice as the “amalgamative effect of the use of discursive
and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially
available yet ever-changing repertoires” (p. 40), this study examined the construction of author
identity in the blind review process of a manuscript for an academic journal. The study established
the importance of writer identity in academic context and showed that writer identity is constructed
by the readers not through a pre-determined set of textual features but through the use of discursive
and non-discursive features that became salient in the process of reading and evaluating an academic
156 paul kei matsuda
manuscript. The finding of this study, was later verified in a survey study of editorial board members
for various international journals.
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