Writer Development as Multivoiced Negotiation

In this conception based on Wertsch’s and Engeström’s development of Vygotsky’s theory, a writer’s development is viewed as an expansion in a horizontal border—to complement a vertical level (namely, increase)—in which there is heterogeneity in thinking, or multiple forms of thinking, writing and doing. With ‘multivoiced’ perspectives available for individual writers, human development is expansive. Yet, there is a pattern of ‘privileging’ within a society, resulting in a certain level of negotiation. Therefore, the term ‘multivoiced negotiation’ is proposed in this theme as a third way to conceptualise the notion of writer development.

Smidt (2009) uses the metaphor of ‘ecology’ to argue that writing development involves the interrelationship between writers and their environments. In a school setting, the influence on this interrelationship can arise from teachers, classmates, written genres, norms in classrooms and social cultures. In line with Bakhtin’s concept of utterance in a wider chain of speech communication, Smidt points out that writing development involves a personal negotiation of ‘discourse roles’ and ‘positionings’ because texts are written at the intersection of a social relationship between writers and their addressees where the writers’ voices or inner meanings are in contact with other voices. Writers are not mere meaning makers but also meaning negotiators during the dialogical process of writing. With regard to multiple meanings of language use, Harwood’s (2006) study on pronoun use by academic scholars in the field of politics is an example of ‘(sub)disciplinary heterogeneity’ in academic writing. He noticed that the use of ‘I’ and ‘we’ varied widely among the five academic scholars in his study due to their different beliefs about the appropriate and inappropriate use of first person pronouns in their own academic papers and their colleagues’ texts. Some prefer

to inject a personal element into their text whereas others make it clear that such use of pronouns is ‘not to their taste’. Therefore, Harwood (2006) contends that ‘there is a wide variety of practices and a lack of intradisciplinary conformity with regard to pronoun use’ in political science (pp. 431-432) and that ‘distinguishing between writing practices only at the disciplinary level is an oversimplification’ (p. 443).

Because academic writers develop themselves through the process of multivoiced negotiation, Ivanič (1998) suggests that writer identity has multiple aspects and that writer identity is in flux. She points out that university students often negotiate various discourse roles and voices in their essays to identify themselves with various positions. Some positions are safe whereas others are risky. Therefore, students often express ambivalence about certain roles and reject certain identities through the pattern of ‘privileging’ along the trajectory of their academic writing development.

Examples of negotiation of multivoicedness, or ‘heteroglossia’ according to Bakhtin’s terminology, can be found in several research studies (e.g., Burgess, 2012; Gourlay, 2009; Lillis, 2003). These can be grouped around three aspects as in space, level and time.

In terms of space or border for an expansive development, negotiation might be identified with a threshold, or a ‘betwixt space’ in which there is status ambiguity before transformation. Gourlay (2009) has conducted a study about new undergraduate students regarding their academic writing and she has found that the notion of ‘communities of practice’ is dubious and inapplicable in those cases because ‘emotional destabilization and struggles around identity are a normal part of both transitions and writing’ (p. 181). As students develop themselves to become academic writers, they enter the ‘liminal’ or indeterminable status, or the ‘threshold’ of their identity.

In terms of level, Lillis (2003) argues that the negotiation of voices might bring about two levels of dialogue, as shown in Table 2.9. In the first level, writing is an utterance and becomes part of a wider dialogue between writers and readers within a community. She views dialogue in the first level as a ‘given’. In the second level, writing becomes a site of struggle as two forces are trying to occupy centre stage. Therefore, she views dialogue in the second level as

‘something to struggle for’ because the goal of a dialogic approach is to keep both forces in play.

Table 2.9 Two levels of dialogue (Lillis, 2003, p. 198)

In terms of time with regard to negotiation of meanings, it can be argued that many timescales come into play during an act of writing as part of the writer’s development. Extending Ivanič’s previous framework of writer identity, Burgess and Ivanič (2010) contend that the construction of writer identity through discourse choices can change over time. From a timescale perspective, authorial identity can be seen as a process of identification through the discoursal construction. Therefore, authorial identity develops over time as a continuum in which all stages can never be isolated. Moreover, there is a coordination of time and aspects of writer identity during the very act of writing, suggesting that the concept of perceived writer emerges during the very act of writing and reading. In this respect, there will be more possibilities of selfhood available in the discourse for both new and current writers to adopt in the future (Burgess & Ivanič, 2010).

According to Table 2.10, there are five aspects of writer identity in relation to timescales and they can exist, develop and change on various timescales from sociocultural time (decades), ontogenetic time (months), mesolevel time (weeks) and microgenetic time (seconds).

Table 2.10 Aspects of writer identity in relation to timescales (Burgess & Ivanič, 2010, p. 243)

However, two aspects of writer identity require attention here and these are discoursal self and authorial self because they are constructed only at microgenetic time (seconds), or ‘in particular acts of writing’, to resonate with the assumption that identity is in flux. Nevertheless, this assumption is problematic because it does not acknowledge the fact that writers can have ‘signature voice’ or unique style in their texts—a key point emphasised in the notion of individual maturity. Therefore, one important question arises: ‘What aspect of writer identity does this ‘signature voice’ refer to?’ Furthermore, this assumption suggests that discoursal self and authorial self cannot develop over time to reach mesolevel and ontogenetic times. If it is so, what about the identity in texts? Is the identity in texts only constructed at seconds, minutes and hours? To perceive identity in writing as both synchronic and diachronic, it is likely that authors need to examine the continuum of experience. Zerubavel (1981) argues that humans as social actors use time with their ‘undifferentiated continuum’ of experience to give classification, categorisation and meaning to their identity development. This continuum is understood as ‘a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, but the extremes are quite distinct (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010, p. 377).

Although the stages model of development contends that novice depend on rules and expert rely on their intuition (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986), Carter (1990) also argues for a pluralistic, dynamic view of writing expertise as a continuum because continuum ‘graphically represents both the developmental relationship between general and local knowledge and the principle of relative generality of knowledge’ (p. 274). To put it another way, he argues that expert writers use both rules and intuition during their writing but both elements are fused and it is difficult to tell immediately whether it is influenced by rules or by intuition. Carter’s view implies that in each piece of writing, there is a represented world in which the author performs their identity by a mixture of both rules and intuition.

Also from a dynamic perspective, Knight (2010) proposes two trajectories to consider how identity is constructed as in (a) affiliation and (b) individuation, shown in Figure 2.5. The affiliation trajectory refers to ‘the communal identification of participants into communities of bonds’ (Knight, 2010, p. 35). People negotiate who they are with shared identities of the community and then they identify themselves as members of such culture. As for the individuation trajectory, Martin (2010) argues that it deals with classification, power and recognition as one conceives of culture dividing into smaller communities with shared identities, sub-culture and persona which shape individual members. The hierarchy can be looked either upwards or downwards as people negotiate or classify identities on the affiliation or individuation trajectory.

Figure 2.5 Two directions of identification: affiliation and individuation (Martin, 2010, p. 24)

With regard to language, Prior (2001) argues that voice is a situated product mingled between personal and social practices. Writers are likely to fuse their personal voice and their social voice in their act of speech. Therefore, there is a cline (a gradual change) of cultural reservoir to individual repertoire, and vice versa, as shown in Figure 2.6 (Martin, 2006).

Figure 2.6 A cline (a gradual change) between cultural reservoir and individual repertoire (Martin, 2006, p. 294)

With regard to the individuation trajectory, it can be argued that writers draw on discourse as reservoir to create their own repertoire. At the same time, writers follow the affiliation trajectory as they negotiate shared identities in the community from which they claim membership.

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These three conceptions of writer development are rooted in different social theories and provide different kinds of evidence and questions regarding the issues of authorial identity in academic writing. Rather than synthesising these conceptions to offer absolute truth, I decide to keep them all in play and use them as a theoretical background to formulate my research question and design my study which will be discussed in the next chapter.

2.6. Summary

In this chapter, I began my literature review by discussing the issues of academic writing from the perspective of the academic literacies model. Then, I

examined relevant social theories on discourse and identity as well as social theories on development to formulate different conceptions of authorial identity and writer development. My aim in the literature review chapter was to highlight that the issues of academic writing are complex. Moreover, I suggested that different social theories provide different views of the same research phenomenon which are helpful for guiding the research design of this study.