The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity: Constructing a Self 3031095626, 9783031095627

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Problems and Possibilities with Written Identity
The Speech of the Place
Language Diversity and Equal Access
Helping to Make this Happen
Discourse, Identity, and Controversy in Educational Policy
Questions of Language Difference
Differentiation and Distinction
References
Chapter 2: Constructing Written Identity
The Persistent Domination of the Authorized Voice
The Person within the Prose
Montaigne’s Reflective Essay
Larger Shapes and Purposes of Written Identity
Voice and Identity
Taking apart the Metaphor of “Voice”
The Components of “Voice”
Conclusions
References
Chapter 3: Written Identity as Cultural Expression
Writing Ourselves into Discourse Events
Some Misconceptions Concerning Voice
Language as Collective Action
An Ethnography of Written Identity
Exploration as a Source of Voice
Turning Observations into Voice
References
Chapter 4: Identity and the Levers of Power
Identity and Affiliation
Individual Identity and Group Identity
Identity as a Function of ‘Habitus’
The Production of Texts
The Establishment of a Stable Self
So, What Exactly Do We Mean by Voice?
So This Is What We Really Do When We Teach an Academic Voice
Subject Positions and Identity
This Is What We Really Do When We Teach an Academic Voice
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: How to Register a Difference
Register and Its Effects
Politeness, Formality, and Distance
Field, Tenor, and Mode
Repairs
Examples of Register in Some First-Year Personal Narratives
References
Chapter 6: Codes in Composition: Crossing Community Boundaries
Once More to the Speech of the Place
Code Use and Educational Attainment
Codes and Composition
Classifying Codes
Recognizing Code Use in First-Year Student Writing
Elaborated Code and Its Uses
Codes and Controversy
Applications in the Teaching of Writing
References
Chapter 7: Schemas, Frames, and the Shapes of Meaning
Erving Goffman on Frames
Identity and the Shapes of Memory
The Nature of Cognitive Schemas
Schemata as Filters for Experience
Purposes and Values for Addressing Voice
More About Frames
Kinesthetic Image Schemas
Conclusions Regarding Cognitive Organization and Identity
References
Chapter 8: Helping Writers Get Results
Storytelling: Models for the Construction of Narratives
Inventing Personae for Profiles
The Role of Explorer in the Model of Montaigne
The Role of the Researcher
A Few Closing Remarks
References
Index

Citation preview

The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity Constructing a Self

John S. Schmit

The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity

John S. Schmit

The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity Constructing a Self

John S. Schmit English Department Augsburg University Minneapolis, MN, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-09562-7    ISBN 978-3-031-09563-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Deborah, a loving critic, a loyal supporter, and the best model for an author I know.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the continual cooperation and commitment of my students over the years. In both my writing classes and linguistic classes, these smart and able young people have stepped forward with expressions of goodwill and curiosity. Some of them, I know, have been on paths toward the classrooms where they themselves will teach, and they have buoyed my hopes for the learning they will engender among their own students. Some have sought positions of leadership in a world that desperately needs them to lead. Many have been talented creative writers and poets who give voice to beautiful and moving words. Finally, I have a special affection and respect for those incarcerated students I have known, who showed respect not so much for me as for themselves and the roles they have occupied in the prison classrooms where they eagerly shifted their identities from wards of the carceral state to gifted and motivated college students. I also must acknowledge the support I have received from both past and present members of the Augsburg English Department, the Honors Program, and the Master of Arts in Leadership Program in which I taught for many years. I found it impossible to lose my faith in my profession so long as I had these colleagues. Over the years I also had the honor to present collaborative work with colleagues and friends from other institutions of higher education. And of course, there is my wife, Deborah Appleman, who encouraged me and sustained me, who helped me with all aspects of my career, and who provided an excellent model of a teacher and researcher. vii

Contents

1 Problems and Possibilities with Written Identity  1 2 Constructing Written Identity 19 3 Written Identity as Cultural Expression 43 4 Identity and the Levers of Power 57 5 How to Register a Difference 79 6 Codes in Composition: Crossing Community Boundaries 93 7 Schemas, Frames, and the Shapes of Meaning115 8 Helping Writers Get Results127 Index137

ix

About the Author

John  S.  Schmit  has been a professor of linguistics and writing for the better part of four decades. Working at a university dedicated to equity and inclusion, he advocates for the rights of students to use their own language varieties to construct their written voices as they work to represent themselves faithfully on the page. Schmit remains a student of composition studies and an active participant in the scholarship of teaching and learning across disciplines. He lives in St. Paul, MN with his wife, Deborah Appleman, and the two enjoy hiking, cycling, reading, and relaxing at their home on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

xi

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2

Kinneavy’s triangle The metaphor of voice

20 33

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Problems and Possibilities with Written Identity

The Speech of the Place For generations, teachers of expository writing have focused on helping students develop facility with Standard English. Few teachers imagined that this focus might have negative consequences for their students. Many teachers still hold that this emphasis serves their students well, and in part they are right. Facility with the Standard remains an important protection against biases: classism, racism, elitism, and a host of denigrations visited upon those thought to be less intelligent, less literate, less academically able, and thus, in short, less socially desirable. As our awareness of educational equity increases, those of us in the profession of teaching language and communication arts must now confront this reality: that our well-­ meaning methods and motives have probably driven out as many writers from the academy as they have helped. In a historical context, of course, this isn’t surprising. Throughout most of the twentieth century our educational institutions held that the path to enfranchisement ran through them. Without the acquisition of Standard English, people would not gain full membership in the middle class. We still hear the words in most commencement ceremonies: degrees are granted with “all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.” Acceptance and acquisition of the Standard has been essential to that privilege. It may even be a centuries-old belief that elite educational institutions set the standard (and the Standard) for social acceptance and eventual © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_1

1

2 

J. S. SCHMIT

distinction. In Chap. 4 we will hear at length from Pierre Bourdieu, who made this case as well as anyone, but in the meantime we can explore the problem and anticipate some solutions. So, what is the problem? We can start by defining Standard English as an antidemocratic institution. Many years ago, James Sledd (1969) used to tell his students that Standard English was “the language of the bosses.” It is a linguistic top-down projection of social expectations. Grammatical prescriptivists reinforced this belief by declaring that those who failed to master the Standard and all its nuances were responsible for the “deterioration” of English. John Simon declared that descriptive linguists—those who studied what language users actually did rather than stipulating what they ought to do—were “a scourge upon their race” (Do You Speak American, episode 1). For years educational institutions favored Simon over Sledd. There is middle ground, of course, but Sledd would have relegated its occupants to the minions of the “mealy-mouthed,” and I have never lost the fear that he was right. I have asked hundreds of students the question over the years: how do we address the Standard when teaching students from nonstandard homes and communities? The customary answer involves “code-switching”: a practice that cannot be explained to these students without come acknowledgement that their language—the language of friends, family, community, elders—is not good enough. And not-good-enough doesn’t end with language. It is a judgment that pervades all aspects of human identity. Most writing teachers I know are well intentioned, and among the youngest generation of them most of what I am claiming here might even go unchallenged. They have been educationally reared in an age that questions well-meaning but antidemocratic practices. Most of them believe deeply that access to education is not distributed equally and that equity in this distribution is deeply to be sought. Even then, though, they find themselves potentially at odds with those who control the dominant discourse of our social institutions. The phrase “dominant discourse” now stands in for Standard English and harkens to the claim Sledd made all those years ago: that the Standard is, in fact, “the language of the bosses” and that those of us who teach it dutifully—if unwittingly—do their bidding. Maybe if we were to think of language as art rather than instrument we might find a new path. If our metaphors for discourse resembled poems rather than tools, then we might offer students of expository writing not just a new way of envisioning discourse but envisioning themselves. Years

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

3

ago, Wallace Stevens spoke to the purpose of poetry and in so doing spoke to the purpose of all language: The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. (“Of Modern Poetry”)

He follows these lines with one more crucial observation about language: “It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.” These lines offer not only description but admonition. Those of us who teach writing need to know what is enough. We need to help our students write new scripts for new scenes in a future that is unfolding as we speak. Most of all, we must give our students permission to use the speech of the place, which they, of course, have already learned. Language Diversity and Equal Access Anyone who has taught a class of writing students from varied social backgrounds will quickly notice not just difference but disparity: literally rendered, this word describes the inequality inherent in academic difference. The middle-class students frequently get to roll along while the students from the margins struggle for every handhold and foothold on a steep climb. The academic world does not see them as compeers; neither does the world of commerce. The justice system offers advantage to the members of its more esteemed communities. The political class, even when it ostensibly seeks to represent all constituencies, too frequently does not admit those whose voices represent those on the periphery. So, what should we do? Schools purport themselves to be the great equalizers, and sometimes they are, but so long as those who teach look upward in homage, the disparity will continue. The central premise of this volume is that we need not only to enable students from across the social spectrum to use the speech of the place, but we need to honor their identities as they do. We need to acknowledge that “the speech of the place” is not just that of our place; it is the speech of all places. It shouldn’t be the case—though it too

4 

J. S. SCHMIT

frequently is—that the speech of undesirable places becomes undesirable of itself. Worse, this lack of desirability comes from and subsequently returns to those whose speech it is. The question I have been asking for nearly four decades now—and that others have pondered even longer—regards the efficacy of any treatment against linguistic disparities. Can we do anything to change the attitudes we have toward the languages of the other? Some of our best writers have tried, including James Baldwin, Geneva Smitherman, and Gloria Anzaldua, so we have paths to follow. The question we should anticipate next is the same one we have been hearing for years: how do we give sanction to nonstandard voices without stealing advantage from those who do not acquire the Standard as part of their legacy? In the US, the answer might seem simple: we act like Americans. Maybe we can trust, as the rest of the English-speaking world does, that English has its own center of gravity, its own centripetal force, and it isn’t up to us to make the political case, the cultural case, or the economic case for its benefits. These cases are already well established. Let’s consider, then, some facts about world Englishes. According to David Crystal, speakership of English across the globe is approaching 2 billion people, nearly 25% of the Earth’s population, up from 20% just a quarter century ago. With a population of 400 million native speakers, English is the most spoken language on the planet. This hunger for English has many sources, but it seems clear that people recognize its benefits; no one has to make the case any longer. English provides access to social power. It enables stronger and more numerous social relationships. It allows participation in policy making. And it provides enfranchisement across a wide spectrum of political venues, from voting rights to liberation from various forms of oppression. English allows its speakers to come to the proverbial table. Should they come without their own identities? What would be the point? Culturally, English frames a host of linguistic enterprises: from the arts to mass media to social media to social customs to the humanities and beyond. While none of these interests falls solely within the province of English, recent cultural innovations have emerged in English speaking venues. When we consider the emergence of social media, the centers of gravity have largely been located in the US: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram, for example, are all American companies. While communication on these platforms is multilingual, the founding forces of English leave an imprint in the form of linguistic innovation. These shifts in

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

5

linguistic practice, of course, have been a source of much consternation within the camps of linguistic conservativism. How many times have we heard that English is going to hell in an SMS handbasket. That we mistake enrichment for degradation says much about the centripetal force of the Standard. Economically, the English-speaking world exerts incredible influence. According to Christopher McCormick (2013), there exists a strong correlation between “better English” and better economies. In fact, McCormick opens his assessment with the claim that “Billions of people around the globe are desperately trying to learn English—not simply for self-improvement, but as an economic necessity.” His study finds that as scores on the EF English Proficiency Index go up, so does gross national income per capita. Here too we might see this correlation as evidence that the Standard is what matters. The title of McCormick’s article spells this out clearly: “Countries with Better English Have Better Economies.” The question at hand, though, regards motivation to learn “better English” versus the compulsion to do so. If students in US schools are compelled to perform in the Standard across a range of academic settings, and this compulsion in turn creates multiple tiers of student status, what are the potential outcomes? Economically, as McCormick has just argued, one outcome is a potentially broad range of financial successes. If, on the other hand, both capitalism and democracy coexist, then there may be an argument as well that those who desire higher incomes will recognize Standard English as their path forward. To be fair, this economic argument has strong merit. If students from nonstandard-speaking communities are educated in under-resourced schools, we risk the continuation of an economic underclass. On the other hand, we have to attempt to measure the effect of student underperformance based on language-based assessments that label some students as less successful and less desirable. If these assessments result from systemic marginalization within educational systems that bestow privilege on better-­English speakers and stigma to nonstandard speakers, then we have an inherently inequitable system. How, then, do we create the simultaneous possibilities of economic inclusion and linguistic inclusion? At my university, and at most institutions with similarly diverse student populations, we would make this argument: students need to be themselves and learn to advocate for themselves. This means that when they show up—on the written page as well as in person—they need to be in control of their own identities. They need to say who they are and produce

6 

J. S. SCHMIT

discourse consistent with that identity. Yes, we want them to gain facility in Standard language, but not as a means for reshaping their identities. As this chapter attempts to make clear, there are a host of reasons for mastering the Standard: equitable access to social and cultural institutions and positions of power; free expression of identity without the burden of stigma; upward economic mobility; inclusion in Standard-speaking communities; and freedom from ethnocentric biases imposed by forces and persons outside themselves. The linguistic mean streets are meanest along the avenues of the Standard. The objective, though, is not to pass but to be prepared to talk back in the speech of the place. Helping to Make this Happen We should begin this section with a number of caveats. First, in a democratic society the choice of personal identity should begin with the families of our students and eventually transfer to the students themselves. Schools and their systems are, if we are honest about it, paternalistic, and frequently those who control the schools want to keep them the way they are. Unquestionably, schools have the responsibility to ensure that students leave them prepared for the worlds that lie beyond them. Too often, though, American institutions of learning are shaped by prevailing ideologies with roots in the soil of white, middle-class, Christian orthodoxies. Educators frequently like to think of themselves as progressive, open hearted and open minded, altruistic, and generous. We like to imagine that we are advocates for those we teach and for the schools we administer. Those of us who teach in liberal arts institutions proclaim that we work tirelessly for the liberation of our students. But any conversation about curricular reform quickly exposes our conservatism, and in the current political age it seems particularly clear that at the heart of conservatism, whatever form it takes, lies an imperative to keep power where it is. This may seem counterintuitive, but a deeper look might reveal some unwholesome truths. Educational institutions are rife with experts. We train and hire and produce consultants in large numbers. Our pedagogies find shape in both unquestioned tradition and in well-funded innovations. These are our problems and our opportunities, but what about our students? Yes, we bear an enormous responsibility to them for an education that can provide a foundation for a lifetime of success, but what exactly are we educating them for? Among the most frequent answers are economic stability and

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

7

productivity: jobs in the world of commerce, for example. This instrumentalist approach, however, enables paternalism and furthers the agenda of education for work rather than education for fulfilling lives: for citizenship, for leadership, for cultural and artistic expression, for stewardship in a world whose environments are threatened, and for moral leadership in societies that are too often Darwinian. If we truly believe in education for the whole person, then we need to return to the actual people whom we teach: people with vital identities and expressive impulses of their own. There are myriad ways in which the practice and performance of identity determines our paths in life. Professionally, communicative abilities aid in promotions, higher salaries, institutional influence, and community standing. At the same time, schools are in the business of social reproduction. Schools reproduce social norms by teaching school children to emulate the communicative patterns of community leaders. Schools perpetuate the status quo, linguistically as much as in any other way. It is their purpose to replicate the values of the communities they serve as well. In the best of all possible worlds, these values and those of individual students would align, but as the US becomes more culturally and socially diverse, this alignment becomes more strained. The powerful forces of cultural assimilation once supported, and were supported by, public schooling. Today’s democratic impulses—the desire that all students should be free to find, forge, or otherwise fashion individual identity—are frequently constrained by the unstated outcomes of schooling, primarily the desire to provide a common identity that fosters civil cooperation and a sense of belonging. This last goal should be not only desired but prized. But who belongs, and under what conditions? This question brings us back to a host of ways of looking at language and the ways in which its varieties attach to our deeply held sense of who we are. We express ourselves in these varieties: regional dialects, social class codes, jargons and argots, and ethnically conditioned grammatical variants. American regional identities, like British regional identities, are a source of pride from within and occasional scorn from without. The language of each new generation incorporates, at least for a time, expression of new values and concerns, and the perception that these expressions differ from those of previous generations is paramount to their success and dissemination. If these claims are true, then it is worth our while to name the nature of these differences.

8 

J. S. SCHMIT

Discourse, Identity, and Controversy in Educational Policy The controversy around discourse and its impact on racial and ethnic identity is aptly described and debated by a variety of educators who recognize competing needs among students from “lower” socioeconomic communities, particularly communities of color and especially African-American communities. The question is answered on both sides in terms of linguistic justice: language policy that leads to both social and economic equality and opportunity. On one side of the debate scholars argue that teaching students to excel solely in the discourses of their home communities is sufficient, claiming that the attainment of an authentic personal voice is a sufficient educational aim. The problem is not with the nature of education but rather with racist responses to language difference. Such positions suggest that endemic biases against certain language varieties abide because systemic biases against particular social groups is allowed to persist. The adage in sociolinguistics is that if you want to find the most desirable varieties of language, look for the most desirable groups. The converse of this adage is true as well. This argument also suggests, though, that the problem is not in our discourses but in our prejudices. Support for these prejudices engenders support for linguistic supremacy, which predominantly favors the language and discourses of white America. On the other side lies an understanding of a need for students from racially and ethnically diverse communities to attain proficiency in a variety of discourses, among those the linguistic varieties that engender power and distinction. In “The Politics of Teaching…” Lisa Delpit (1995) makes a strong case that these aims are not fundamentally opposed. Citing, among others, the work of Mike Rose (Lives on the Boundary, 1989) and the words of bell hooks, (Talking Back, 1989), Delpit explains this false choice. She makes the case that one develops successful literacy skills not by focusing on skills but rather on the content of one’s writing and the process by which one learns to write. Rather than promoting discourse practices that highlight a set of us-vs.-them choices, she argues for developing new linguistic possibilities “by transforming the new discourse so that it contains within it a place for the students’ selves” (p. 164). She goes on to explain this position concerning the role of teachers within a new discourse: “To do so, they must saturate the dominant discourse with new meanings, must wrest from it a place for the glorification of their students and their forebears” (p.  164). Delpit further suggests that teachers can acknowledge the “discourse-stacking” that not only exists within our

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

9

society but creates unfair advantages for those whose discourse practices are not so much an accomplishment as an inheritance. While Pierre Bourdieu focuses on discourse practice as an institutional force that confers distinction as an essential part of its operation, Delpit focuses on the agency that the teaching profession confers upon its members. One expression of this agency lies within a practice that Vershawn Ashanti Young calls code-meshing: an integration of Standard English and African-American English. Unlike code-switching, which involves of movement back and forth between two varieties (this happens between languages as well as varieties), code-meshing blends rather than switches. The practice of switching, according to Young, maintains a hierarchical distance between these two discourse forms, preserving the supremacy of Standard English over vernacular. Meshing, on the other hand, provides the opportunity to infuse the dominant discourse with new meanings in the way that Delpit suggests. While the practice of code-switching maintains the “discourse stacking” that Delpit mentions, code-meshing offers the possibility for leveling the difference between these two discourses. Geneva Smitherman, an eminent scholar of language and discourse practices, has demonstrated the processes of blending the Standard variety with Black language in her own academic prose. For example, in her chapter “It Bees Dat Way Sometime” she reviews the rules for constructing verbal aspect in Black English. In her commentary on the use of be as a marker of durative aspect she writes the following: Now she mighta just got there, or maybe she even been there for days, but the point here is not the amount of time but the intensity and validity of the fact. She been there long enough for me to be certain bout it, so ain no point in keepin on askin questions bout it! (p. 23)

In terms of authorial intent, this quotation seems clear enough, given that Smitherman has written for decades about our inordinate focus on issues of correctness in written discourse. To my mind, this example of genuine language rather than correct discourse makes its point forcefully about the speech of the place. In fact, Smitherman converses in the speech of at least two places: the speech of the academy and the speech of Black communities. Her ability to blend the two seamlessly speaks directly to processes that Vershawn Young refers to above as code-meshing. Among the most recent and powerful commentary on responses to Black language (BL) we find the work of April Baker-Bell (2020). She

10 

J. S. SCHMIT

speaks forcefully about linguistic racism in our classrooms. Policies that support universal enforcement of Standard English constitute a form of linguistic supremacy, and as such create social divisions on the basis of language varieties. As Baker-Bell powerfully argues, such practices come at a great cost, not just for BL speakers but for all Black students: “The only thing worse than Black students’ experiencing anti-black linguistic racism in classrooms is when they internalize it. When Black students’ language practices are suppressed in classrooms or they begin to absorb messages that imply that BL is deficient, wrong, and unintelligent, this could cause them to internalize anti-blackness and develop negative attitudes about their linguistic, racial, cultural, and intellectual identities and about themselves” (p. 10). This argument is in line with other commentaries concerning what social science literature has called “internalized self-loathing.” Such commentaries date back to the late 1930s and are too numerous to recount here, but suffice it to say that the case made by Baker-Bell is well established. While the conceptualization of “internalization” has remained a site of contest in social psychology, there are good reasons to believe that its effects are real and play into beliefs among Black Americans’ self-­efficacy and self-worth (see for example, Brown et al., 2002). If linguistic justice has a place in our conversations beyond social psychological literature, it should be taken seriously here.

Questions of Language Difference It is a given in the study of language variation that questions of correctness abound. We are driven by our linguistic ideologies to assign values to the varieties we encounter, beginning with questions of what is right and what is wrong. These judgments have no real basis other than their ability, or lack of ability, to match with our belief systems. As the foregoing commentary suggests, such differences may garner favor or meet strong resistance. The categories listed below attempt some explanations for our responses to these variations. Regional Differences  Geographic varieties of English have existed for as long as English has existed. They are the products of speech communities whose members share a common identity. They also ascribe degrees of status or stigma to their users. Because we think of regional dialects mainly in phonological terms—we recognize their sound patterns more than their lexical or grammatical differences—we tend not to think about ­geographical

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

11

variation in writing. At the same time, though, certain words are closely associated with particular regions, and so people who use those words are identifiable by their regional origins. Whether the topic is a freeway, a soft drink, an insect, a container, a food product, a greeting, a meteorological event, or body of water, a simple word choice can assign you a written identity. Idioms, colloquialisms, and folk sayings may offer similar clues. The main reason for paying attention to regionalisms is that they bring bias with them. Social Codes  In the 1950s Basil Bernstein began a fascinating study that has attracted surprisingly little attention from recent scholars. His purpose was to explain a correlation between social status and educational success. This correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement has frequently been demonstrated, but explanations for this correlation remain imprecise and possibly even evasive. Often the differences in educational success are cast in terms of “resources”: those points of access to literacy that exist within homes and communities, such as personal computers and other connectable devices, books, magazines, and newspapers. Not surprisingly, the greater the financial resources that are present, the more abundant will be the literary resources. Yet another even more powerful resource is typically not mentioned: social knowledge and shared cultural background: common experience, educational experiences, work environments, institutions of worship, social connections, recreational activities, entertainment pursuits, and so forth. Jargons and Argots  These linguistic forms frequently derive from professions, activities, hobbies, and even illicit or illegal enterprises. One of the first things we do when we enter such fields is to learn the vocabulary that provides the fastest access to important concepts within that discipline. Accountants, sailors, IT support people, horsemen, sports fans, clothing designers, fashionistas, and perhaps hundreds of other enthusiasts and professionals not only use jargons regularly but sometimes betray their identities by choosing metaphors that derive from these jargons. ‘Bottom-line’ issues are rooted in balance sheets. Information seekers ‘access their network.’ Patterns of social and professional advancement are arranged within vertical schemes that place the best in the metaphorically highest positions. We think in metaphors, and the social and cultural orientations within which we are raised determine which metaphors are most appropriate and effective.

12 

J. S. SCHMIT

Ethnic Varieties  As the section above illustrates, African-American varieties are among the best-known forms of nonstandard English, and their speakers frequently use them to project African-American identity. Interestingly, White Americans also use words and expressions from these varieties: some to lend credibility of an urban identity; some to appropriate identities in music and hip-hop lyrics; and some even to express social or cultural solidarity. While it may be troubling to think of these varieties as linguistic commodities, they can acquire that value. That value, by the way, can be highly negative or highly positive, depending on the status of the speaker or writer, the context in which the variety is used, or the speech act that frames its use. While the arts accept and value Black language (BL), educational settings castigate it. Ownership also matters. Unlicensed use of BL can be seen as cultural appropriation, caricature, or—if a hearer perceives irony—mockery and denigration. The identities that attach to BL, then, can be quite complex.



Differentiation and Distinction

All of the foregoing discussions are in some ways built around issues of differentiation. Sometimes writers want to distinguish themselves; they want to have voices that are different, identifiable, and valued. Sometimes they want to prove membership within a literate society. They may want to demonstrate linguistic prowess or artistry. In any case, they want to stand out, even if the ways in which they stand out are fraught with troubling questions. For example, will the acquisition of Standard academic language bring about a separation from the language and culture of their home communities? Will they face a series of shifting identities as they encounter new expectations every year from teachers and professors whose values and criteria vary widely? Must they cave in to the pressure of grades and other forms of approval from those who grade their work? Another key idea behind the accomplishment of a written identity involves belonging rather than standing out. Within the academy there are a variety of language communities, and to be a member of any of these we need to learn the vocabulary, the conventions, and the points of view, among many other discourse features, that make us recognizable as members. The identities of memoirists and fiction writers might reside at one end of this spectrum, while the identities of scientific investigators can be found at the other end. To a large extent, then, we don’t get to choose the voice we want to use; our discourse community chooses it for us. Sperling

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

13

and Appleman note the following problem concerning the difference between a voice that provides inclusion and a voice that sets a writer on the outside of a larger discourse community: Elbow (2007) … identifies the paradox that voice, while appearing to be a window onto a writer's true self, might more properly be taken as a window onto who a writer claims to be—at the moment, in the genre, in the purpose of a particular text. In this regard, a writer writes in different voices—even fake ones—for different circumstances of writing. This point is analogous to Goffman’s (1959) on the multiple behavioral and linguistic presentations of self that one makes in the varied contexts of everyday life. (p. 72)

Elbow appears to claim that inclusion comes at a cost of authenticity. The counterargument might hold that authenticity can be shaped, reclaimed, impersonated, or simply presented in a Standard voice as well as in a culturally derived voice, but this is the sentiment that no doubt brought Sledd to his use of the words “mealy mouthed.” For those who don’t pay the cost in authenticity, it is an easy argument. Even coming from those academics who did not come from Standard-speaking backgrounds, this argument suggests that the key to success is for the oppressed to learn to imitate their oppressors. Issues of power and position influence the voices that we adopt and create. The contexts within which we write cast their weight against the --- of choice. Sperling and Appleman summarize these influences nicely: Voice also invites ideological discussion, being conceptually connected to issues of social and cultural power that are central to sociocultural approaches to literacy. In its ideological sense, voice becomes metaphorically extended to cover issues of equity and access as they relate to the social contexts in which students learn to read and write: Some students, but not all, have a voice in their learning. Some voices are silenced, some privileged in reading and writing contexts, some stronger than others at different times and places and under different reading and writing circumstance. (2011, p. 71)

All voices, then, are not created equal. Some voices open gates while others close them. In response, we can imagine a critical approach to voice, one that examines and maybe even mitigates against imbalances of power. There are a number of sociolinguistic concepts that might explain the ways in which different social groups create different identities for their members. Cultural norms generate expectations for the ways in which we

14 

J. S. SCHMIT

present ourselves through speech, so it is reasonable to assume that writers will access similar norms when creating documents. In fact, sociolinguistics begins with the idea that language is a crucial signifier of social membership. Language tells people who we are. William Labov’s work revealed brilliantly the ways in which language varies among speakers of different social strata. Basil Bernstein noted the differences among speakers of different social classes in the UK and the impact of these linguistic behaviors on their success in education. Lesley Milroy (1980) showed that language behaviors vary within social networks, and they also explored the ideological effects of these differences, naming some of the ways in which believes about language grow out of and influence the cultural systems that we associate with them. Shirley Brice Heath defines language ideologies as “self-evident ideas and objectives a group holds concerning roles of language in the social experiences of members as they contribute to the expression of the group (1977).” The thread that ties the works of these eminent researchers together is the underlying belief that language varieties reflect the cultural roots and identities of their speakers. By extension, the attitudes toward these cultural roots mirror a speaker’s linguistic orientation. Labov famously discovered that for young African-American males, Standard English speakers within the group were called “lames”: a term meant to signify a lack of authenticity and membership. (see “The linguistic consequences of being a lame” 1973). As this chapter continually asserts, language is a collective activity, and so its realizations inevitably reflect the collective knowledge, identities, and behaviors of the groups within which language occurs. Sperling and Appleman, in their comprehensive overview of studies on voice, summarize the research on voice and its manifestations in the following way: We began this article with the assertion that voice is a language performance—always social, mediated by experience, and culturally embedded. As we have seen, and, as Bakhtin (1981, 1986) reminded us, voice is inevitably and at once the articulation of a defined self and the animation of socially and culturally mediated activity. This perspective on voice reminds us, as we have suggested throughout this article, that voice is by its nature infused with the values and ways of being of the world of the other. Given this prem-

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

15

ise, we recognize the compelling redundancy in the claim that “language performance” is always social. For we are always performing in the service of identifying, discovering, shaping, and asserting in anticipation of and in answer to the other. (p. 81)

Language practice, language difference, and linguistic possibility are bounded by social and cultural performance, and to perform language is to express fidelity to the societies from which we come. As a matter of democratic practice, then, it is essential that institutions recognize and respect the Englishes that we speak. Standard English, which James Sledd described as “the language of the bosses,” is the prestige variety of the language. It imbues its speakers with status and acceptance—so long as they are in a Standard-speaking setting venue. On the other hand, in places where local varieties prevail use of the Standard variety not only marks one as an outsider, but it also signals that a speaker lacks the best attributes of membership in that community: cool, street savvy, local respect, credibility, and authenticity. In these settings, Standard speech marks one as “the other.” There is an ironic tradeoff between prestige and authenticity in the use of non-standard speech. Non-Standard varieties are thought to make one sound genuine, honest, and unpretentious. Standard speech, maybe because it gives one membership in a community that has no clear ownership (it presents as universal rather than unique), appears at first to be “neutral,” unbiased, commonly owned, even “vanilla.” If we look harder, though, we can see the connections between this variety and the mechanisms of privilege. Standard language gets us past the gatekeepers. It signifies our status. Most importantly, it reifies social difference in terms of value. As Walt Wolfram has said, “Language ideology is among the most entrenched belief systems in society, rivaling religion, morality, and nationalism in terms of partisanship.” It is part of our mental geography, and for the most part it moves unrecognized across the landscape of our daily lives. And as Norman Fairclough has said, “Ideology is more powerful when its workings are least visible” (1989, p. 85). Lee (2007) invoked Bakhtin’s notion of double-voiced discourse to describe the relationship between the cultural voices that students bring into academic settings and the academic utterances they encounter there. She introduced the concept of cultural modeling: “a framework for the

16 

J. S. SCHMIT

design of learning environments that examines what youth know from [their] everyday settings to support subject matter learning” (p. 15). This takes shape in schools with the result that “differences between community-­ based and school-based norms can be negotiated by both students and teachers” (p. 15) (S and A, p. 79). In “Self Reliance,” Emerson famously said that “Imitation is suicide.” This claim tells us a great deal about any system of learning or letters that requires its members to forego their own language in service to language norms they learn through imitation. While it might be a bit strong to say that getting your own voice wrong, or forsaking your own voice for one that is externally more prestigious, is a form of cultural suicide, we should recognize that there are, as Labov said, serious consequences for those who adopt that language patterns of the other.

References Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Dismantling anti-black linguistic racism in English language arts classrooms: Toward an anti-racist black language pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 59(1), 8–21. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M.  Bakhtin (Michael Holquist, Ed., Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist, Trans.). Austin and London: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brown, T., Sellers, S., & Gomez, J. (2002). The relationship between internalization and self-esteem among black adults. Sociological Focus, 35(1), 55–71. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. The New Press. Elbow. P. (2007). “Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries.” College English. 70(2), 168–88. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Longman. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Heath, S. B. (1977). Social history. In Bilingual education: Current perspectives (Social Science) (Vol. 1, pp. 53–72). Center for Applied Linguistics. hooks, b. (1989) Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York: Routledge. Labov, W. (1973). The linguistic consequences of being a lame. Language in Society, 2(1), 81–115.

1  PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES WITH WRITTEN IDENTITY 

17

Lee, I. D. (2007). Culture, literacy & learning: Taking bloom in the midst of the whirlwind. Teachers College Press. McCormick, C. (2013, November 15). Countries with better English have better economies. Harvard Business Review. Milroy, L. (1980). Language and social networks. Blackwell. Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the Boundary. London: Penguin. Sledd, J. (1969). Bi-dialectalism: “The linguistics of white supremacy”. College English, 58(9), 1307–1315+1329. Sperling, M., & Appleman, D. (2011). Voice in the context of literary studies. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(1), 70–84.

CHAPTER 2

Constructing Written Identity

The Persistent Domination of the Authorized Voice Since my earliest days of teaching writing I’ve used the model above to explain ways to approach writing problems. The bottom of the triangle seldom posed problems for my students since most of them have been well schooled in the analysis of a subject. By definition, this is where expository prose lives. They know the general rules for logical reasoning and have learned most of the fallacies to avoid. They get the idea of “content.” Their teachers have coached them in methods of finding it, developing it, exemplifying it, and conducting rudimentary research. While these skills can generally use refinement, most first-year college students have a good understanding of what it means to say something about the subject of an essay (Fig. 2.1). As for audiences, my students primarily begin in the realm of imagination. At least initially, their audiences are remote and indistinct. These students have inadvertently been coached to write for a one-person audience—their teachers—and as a group we are frequently idiosyncratic and inconsistent. A few weeks of peer review in a writing class can do much to reorient this preconception, but students are savvy enough to know that some members of the audience count far more than others, and at the center of their imagined audience remain their teachers: the grade givers and the ultimate judges. I have discovered that my students are utterly brilliant when it comes to discovering what English teachers like. When © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_2

19

20 

J. S. SCHMIT

Fig. 2.1  Kinneavy’s triangle

You are

here

Writer

Audience

Subject

we tell them to imagine their readers, they think about what will get them the highest grades. They use our catchphrases, avoid our pet peeves, and adopt stances that sound like they could be ours. Every semester at least one student asks me if their grade will suffer in the event that their opinion differs from mine. We are evidently quite transparent. This conception of an audience, those readers who are too frequently cast as the arbiters of value—the academic, the scholar, or teacher—continues to grow despite the principles argued in the previous chapter. Mastery of the Standard represents the single largest goal of expository writing classes. The models of the academic essay offer the clearest map to that mastery. The personal is always subservient to the universal, even after the collapse of modernism. Literacy is defined by centers of power that begin in schools, shift into regulatory bodies that control commerce, and restrict access to higher education and to the professions. As to a sense of self, they nurture identities of subservience. This long preamble is all to say that the concerns listed below have been diminished in value, constrained in application, and assigned value only to the degree that they evidence conformity to the criteria defined by social and cultural power centers. If we are truly looking for liberating models of writing instruction, we have to provide room for the growth of individual, divergent, independent, personal, singular written identities. Standing in the way is a continuing and conservative impulse to maintain both standards and The Standard. To find a motive for the teaching of literacy—an Emersonian impulse, so to speak--I would suggest that we start with considerations of the writer’s identity.

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

21

The Person within the Prose So, regarding that point on the triangle above that focuses on the writer— where do we begin? Our students eagerly embrace the existence of what we call ethos, but the cultural disconnection between Greek rhetoric and American culture initially looks like a chasm to less-experienced expository writers. They know this concept as a good Greek word for impressing writing instructors: know that it represents the nature, the disposition, the spirit of a community; know that their toolkits should contain devices for creating voices; know that it stands at the heart of our conception of ethics. But owning a jeweler’s loupe is different from knowing what one uses it to look for. Persona, character, and role all put them in mind of fiction or drama, and that’s potentially a very good thing, but the generic boundaries that these concepts invoke can be confusing in the expository settings that students have to navigate. “Point of view” is a thing broadly discouraged in secondary schools, as educators from across the spectrum insist that students remain in their proper subject roles. They have clearly heard the sentiment if not the exact words of David Coleman, current President of the College Board. If anyone wondered why attention to personal voice and other forms of identity to be found in writing are not just undervalued but actually proscribed in many school settings, we can invite Coleman into our conversation. After remarking that the two most common forms of writing in American high schools in 2011 were the exposition of a personal opinion and the personal narrative, Coleman’s reaction to personal writing quickly became famous: “The only problem with those two forms of writing is that as you grow up in this world you realize that people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” (The video containing this remark is widely available on the internet.) While Coleman makes a number of questionable claims about the literacy needs of students, this one is important because it seems to capture a sentiment popular among teachers of writing: your purpose in school-sponsored writing is to demonstrate that you have done your work and have learned what you were assigned to learn, as Fiona English’s research verifies (2011, p. 109). This focus on summary and rehearsal rather than on original argument, as Lillis (2013) notes, results in the privileging of a restricted set of opportunities for doing identity work in writing. Essayist literacy, Lillis says, privileges one specific kind of textual unity (oriented to a theme or argument), one relationship between writer and reader (‘anonymous,”

22 

J. S. SCHMIT

“neutral,” and “disembodied”), one identity (middle-class, rational, and possibly male), one aesthetic value (rational and logical), one form of language (the Standard), one shape for a text (linear and transparent), and one learning trajectory (from novice to expert). To the degree that essayist literacy pervades education and specifically school-sponsored writing, it severely limits students and their ability to develop and express their identities in writing. These conclusions are supported by Campbell (1992), Hooks (1988), Frey (1990), and Nye (1990). In the end, writing to these literacy conventions constitutes a trial performance rather than an authentic one. Steven Pinker explains this aspect of performance and trial in his recent book on written style. As with many traditional performances within educational settings, many of our students’ essays are built in the world of make-believe: A college student who writes a term paper is pretending that he knows more about his subject than the reader and that his goal is to supply the reader with information she needs, whereas in reality his reader typically knows more about the subject than he does and has no need for the information, the typical goal of the exercise being to give the student practice for the real thing. An activist composing a manifesto, or a minister drafting a sermon, must write as if they are standing in front of a crowd and whipping up their emotions. (2015, p. 28)

Even if such writing is mostly rehearsal, though, it serves an important function of identity development. This ability to conjure a personality out of words offered in exposition is astonishing when we stop to think about it. And, of course, that claim is political: it suggests that personal development lies at the heart of education. We hear phrases like “education of the whole person” with differing ears depending on our beliefs about the largest purposes of learning. Even so, Pinker’s comments about pretending point to a belief that students must show what they can do, and creating written personae is part of that process. Still, regardless of the central concerns of school-sponsored writing, writers have identities. If one tests this claim by polling writing teachers, it seems to stand on bedrock. Rubrics across the US and spanning all levels of composition practice name “voice” as primary trait of successful writing. These rubrics reinforce the believe that we should all to be able to write with a distinctive “voice.” When we think about the possibilities for

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

23

creating an enduring sense of ourselves—an identity, a personality—the whole prospect of writing changes in the eyes of young writers; at least it could if our messages were consistent. Something that previously seemed like an onerous task suddenly seems like an opportunity: to be, to be heard, to have a place in the world. I will claim that having permission to write as a person—a character with an identity and intention, playing a role in public discourse—adds motivation to the task. At first glance it seems like an undeniable characteristic of good writing and a necessary component of any rhetorical situation. And that’s just the beginning. Being enabled to speak in one’s own voice, which is most often the voice of one’s community, stands as a truly liberating prospect. Of course, there is disagreement about what it means to “have a voice.” There is also disagreement about where personal voice is wanted and not wanted in academic discourse. The descriptors contained in writing rubrics are significantly and perhaps intentionally vague. They describe voice in terms of “expressive” writing, which contrasts with expository writing. The rubrics describe such writing as containing emotion, humor, honesty, or “life”: that thing we are told to get one of when our concerns intrude upon the “lives” of others. Writing that exemplifies a strong voice is said to be “engaging”; it “sounds just like you.” Few rubrics suggest that voice needs to be matched to genre or even determined by genre. It might be, then, that “voice” is better described in terms of its intention than its traits, but this leads students even further into the realms of abstraction. So, why “voice”? On one hand, it is true that teachers of some disciplines tell us that the voice we want is something like the classic hard-­ boiled detective’s just-the-facts-ma’am style of exposition. On the other hand, those of us who like to write mostly prefer to express ourselves in our writing, blurring the line between exposition and expression. It should be obvious, too, that this distinction between expository writing and expressive writing constitutes a false dichotomy. Like most categories within the study of literacy, this distinction is not clearly bounded. The areas of overlap are significant, sometimes to the point of rendering the distinction meaningless. “Voice” is prototypical to the extent that we invoke memory and mental models more that we describe its defining traits. At the same time, though, the opportunity to create a voice, to be someone in writing, is always present, even if it is not wholly supported by those who evaluate and assess writing. Maybe more people would like to write if they thought that this projection of personality were the goal. This is

24 

J. S. SCHMIT

unquestionably true, for example, for the incarcerated writers with whom I have worked. Living year after year and decade after decade in a carceral system that erases their identities, the opportunity to create, to see, to transmit a sense of self is an experience beyond transformative. In a time when the concept of ‘disposable commodities’ has extended to human lives—whether they be incarcerated, marginalized, diminished in economic value, or simply relegated out of memory and social importance— opportunities for writers to construct singular identities should be of paramount importance in education. Knowing what we intend to do when we write—as well as what we have permission to do—gives us clarity both of purpose and of voice. I still wonder, though, if students of writing don’t see their attempts at written voice to be something of a trap. Steven Pinker actually provides a clear characterization of what he calls “classic style” in his book A Sense of Style. This is the style that academic and school-sponsored writing typically takes. Pinker says this: The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate. There are many possibilities. A person thumb-­ typing a text message can get away with acting as if he is taking part in a real conversation.

In other words, writers have to adopt roles appropriate to the context for which their discourse is shaped. This role includes self-expression, but the putting on of this role entails much more. Citing Thomas and Turner, Pinker points to the roots of classic style, which we find in the prose of seventeenth-century French essayists, adding the following to explain stylistic variations: “The differences between classic style and other styles can be appreciated by comparing their stances on the communication scenario: how the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish” (p. 29). Rather than using the metaphor of voice, Pinker uses the metaphor of conversation. Because conversation builds on a principle of cooperation, Pinker says, writers can count on their readers to engage their texts in a manner that emulates the cooperative means of personal interactions. There are several additional benefits to this conversational metaphor, including the imagined presence of another person and the role of a participant in conversation. This clarification of role contributes nicely to the

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

25

writer’s sense of place in the discourse. The model might clash with the conventions of essayist literacy, where student writers especially feel discomfort in talking to teachers or teachers or professors on equal social footing. Still, this metaphor offers more description of the writer’s identity than does the metaphor of voice.

Montaigne’s Reflective Essay Another model for essayists was recently presented by way of example in The Best American Essays of 2014. Here John Jeremiah Sullivan included 21 pieces, and of these 18 essays use first-person point of view. One other essay is written entirely in second-person, a combination of direct address and imperatives. It is no coincidence, as Sullivan’s introduction indicates, that this edition of Best American Essays returns our attention to Montaigne’s development of the form. This form, of course, has changed with time. In the book’s introduction Sullivan says, “In France the essay constricts after Montaigne. It turns into something less intimate, more opaque, becoming Descarte’s meditations and Pascal’s thoughts” (xvii). Presumably this metamorphosis continued until the “essay” became a common form in nineteenth-century British periodicals, where its form developed into something distinctly British (Sullivan, 2014, p. xviii). In school settings today, this constriction has reached a point near the end point of the spectrum between personal reflection and impersonal exposition. Ideally appearing to be authorless, many of today’s scholastic essays allegedly transmit information free from human stain. The social forces that cause the essay, and thus essayist literacy, to constrict and to become impersonal, rational, and disembodied, constitute influences too large and too complex for this present study, but we can clearly see the results. As a result, identity work in academic writing is too frequently discouraged or ignored. When teachers and administrators in secondary schools hear echoes of David Coleman’s voice claiming that identity in writing—and presumably elsewhere in American education—should serve the purposes of a generalized but nondescript literacy, younger writers predictably find little room for themselves in the process. In answer to Coleman we can argue that identity is like ideology: it is impossible to exist in the world without one. Even those written identities that appear to have been scrubbed of individuality convey important information about our relationships to those institutions: school, government, religion, commerce, and law, for

26 

J. S. SCHMIT

example. Our performance of written identities demonstrates our membership, core beliefs, values, intentions, and acceptance of those structures that define the ways in which we understand ourselves. This concern brings us back to the very beginning of the essay as a discourse performance. Michel de Montaigne first devised the essay in the sixteenth century as means for reflecting on life’s most immediate questions. His focus was directly on private life. His purpose was exploratory. His structures were free flowing. His form was stream of consciousness. Rather than adopting an expert stance, he used writing to sort out possibilities. In her exploration of Montaigne’s form, Sarah Bakewell (2011) translates his statement this way: “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays. I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial” (p. 36). On a more positive note, despite the oppositions for school policy makers, we might be witnessing a return of the essay to forms more like those of Montaigne. With that argument as background, there exists a set of reasons for the practice of reflective and exploratory writing. First, writers can remove themselves from the realm of make believe that scholastic writing thrusts them into. Return for a moment to Pinker’s description of academic essays. Students too frequently know that the work we assign them creates little by way of authentic meaning. They know they are pretending. Second, exploratory writing can mirror Montaigne’s method of personal investigation, and on their terms. This freedom can result in a variety of ways of knowing a subject, as we will see in a moment. Third, it returns the focus of essay writing to problem solving, a skill that we claim our students must develop and demonstrate. This list is hardly exhaustive, but the following examination by James Kinneavy adds much to this discussion. According to Kinneavy, exploration is one of the four primary aims of discourse: purposes for writing. In this discussion of the relationship between exploration and science, he argues that exploration happens by design rather than by haphazard, random, or unstructured meandering (1971, p. 99). Classic forms of exploratory discourse—ranging from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero to Montaigne, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, and Thoreau—typically use the structure of dialogue. The processes of discovery that underlie these models focus on changes in intellectual viewpoints, and this focus provides a key to our advancement of scientific knowledge. As Kinneavy asserts, “Exploration leads to a testable hypothesis which scientific proof then demonstrates as tenable or not” (p. 100). It is not surprising that the stature of those thinkers mentioned above grows out of

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

27

their ability to follow new ways of examining problems. Why, then, do we first tell students that Emerson’s essays reveal new truths by challenging established beliefs, but then tell them that no one really cares about what they, the students, think? Could there ever have been an Emerson in a world that discounted written identity?

Larger Shapes and Purposes of Written Identity Even writers who have yet to gain significant practice want their writing to “mean” something. This impulse seems almost instinctive. My wife has used a brilliant assignment with beginning creative writers that culminated in a collaborative poem called “What I want my words to do.” It is important to mention that these creative writers were incarcerated, a fact and a condition that made their identities all the more tenuous. Each writer who participated in this assignment wrote one line that began, “I want to words to….”: “I want my words to last forever; I am terrified at the thought of being forgotten” “I want my words walk taller than my life” “I want my words to last as long as those of Shakespeare” “I want my words to last long enough to make someone aware I was here, to make a difference” “I want my words to give birth to new ideas and change lives” “I want my words to burn in the stomach like country corn liquor” “I want my words to transform me into the man that you always wanted me to be” “I want my words to mean something, to go somewhere and say maybe all of this isn’t just, it just is” “I want my words spray into your senses and melt into your dreams” “I want my words break you, to shatter your illusions, and to make you see the truth that we all know and choose to ignore” “I want my words tickle your spine like the fingers of a 12-month old child asleep upon your back”

We all want to live in our words when others read them. We understand that a vibrant written identity might somehow make any one of us immortal. Among the incarcerated, whose identities are muffled and stolen by the systematic effects of imprisonment, the possession of a “voice” takes

28 

J. S. SCHMIT

on a particular importance. We can easily recall the words of Jimmy Santiago Baca, who famously wrote this: Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my past, even to wring from it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was based not on fear of bitterness or apathy but on compassionate involvement and a believe that I belonged (2001, p. 5)

We might ask ourselves about the ways in which our writing instruction gives our students a belief that they belong. If we can embody ourselves in our own language, we can last as long as those words do. With a voice, we have influence. We can make a difference in the world. Our words are our power. They can express all that we believe. Great writers over time have articulated the same sorts of desires that these incarcerated writers expressed about the power of the words they use. Here are a few examples: My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim The limits of my language means the limits of my world. — Ludwig Wittgenstein Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more. — Confucius Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. — Hermann Hesse

While these testimonials address the role of language more broadly than just its creation of an individual writer’s identity, we can easily argue that meaning is inscribed in language by its users and its owners. While language is arguably a public and collective possession, meaning is very much the product and the possession of the individual language user. Cognitive science tells us that every human mind is a closed system, and

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

29

the only way for meanings to be shared among human minds is through representations, most frequently in language. As another means for understanding intention in writing, we might shift our considerations of identity and more directly toward an understanding of meaning. Brain scientist Walter J. Freeman (not the lobotomy guy) puts it this way: “Meaning is created in unique forms within ourselves through the actions and choices we all make…” (2001, 14). The concept of meaning, however, remains elusive. Freeman continues his point by saying the following: Meanings have no edges or compartments. They are not solely rational or emotional, but a mixture. They are not thoughts or beliefs, but the fabric of both. Each meaning has a focus at some point in the dynamic structure of an entire life. Meaning is closed from the outside … . The barrier between us is not like a moat around a castle or a firewall protecting a computer system; the meaning in each of us is a quiet universe that can be probed but not occupied. (p. 14)

Put into the terms of identity, the expression of unique meanings stands as a crucial motivation behind a writer’s identity. While the word unique is frequently used hyperbolically or too generally, in the case of a writer’s meanings it holds a literal significance. The meanings conveyed in a written voice are the products and the property of the writer who created them. One of our imperatives in personal expression—perhaps the guiding purpose behind Montaigne’s original conception of the essay—is to offer insights into the meanings that comprise our identities, our experiences, and our intentions. Freeman goes on to say this: “We can’t fully transport or inject our meaning into anyone else, but we can express ourselves and invite communal actions as a way of bringing into harmony with others some part of the meaning structure within ourselves” (p. 14). If we accept that this invitation to communal action is purposeful and intentional, then we recognize that our expressions of meaning take shape as intentional states: utterances that are about something, that represent something, that stand for something. These intentional states include desire, hope, belief, motivation, and emotion. In the study of literature we assume that intention is inherent in the creation of texts, and this belief authorizes readers to assume that every linguistic gesture—each word choice, each syntactic structure, each implied reference—is purposeful and thus worthy of scrutiny. Consider, for example, line 13 of Theodore

30 

J. S. SCHMIT

Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: “You beat time on my head.” Other single syllable verbs than “beat” would have matched the metrical pattern of the poem—“kept” or “tapped,” for example—but Roethke chose “beat.” As a result of our presupposition (within linguistics, an implicit pragmatic assumption) about the word beat and its analogous meanings, some readers take this word choice as a suggestion that violence was done to the narrator of the poem. Thus, violence and abuse are available to any reader making meaning of this poem, and the meaning of this ambiguous word is steered by the internal meanings of the reader—meanings that in turn presume intentional choices of language on the part of the writer. This presumption can take us in a variety of directions; still, we recognize the word as an intentional expression of the writer’s meaning. John Searle pointed out the ways in which background differs from intentionality (1983). While chess players may do furious battle, it is always within a strict set of rules. Verbal combat on the other hand (from political campaigning rhetoric to the constant status negotiated by any group of men whose number exceeds two) continually seems to evade and rewrite the rules of civility and of logic. As Franz Brentano argues, intentionality is a result of the inexistence of the objects of our arguments. The more intangible the subject of our concern, the more intentionality acts upon it.

Voice and Identity Critics and teachers of writing have long used the word voice to describe some manifestation of the writer’s personality in the texts that a writer produces. So, as we seek to understand this metaphor of voice in writing, we need to say what its relationship is to the discourse within which we find it. We believe, for example, that to “have a voice” is to “be someone”—to establish one’s presence in the world of that discourse. With a strong written voice, we believe, any writer can be exceptional, and who doesn’t want that? If one has a voice, one can be heard—both literally and metaphorically. This voice can also be collective as well as individual, an expression of both unique and shared identity. With it one can represent not only oneself but one’s people: family, community, culture, and friends. We all want to be noticed, and like the incarcerated writers whose words are included above, we want both our words and our lives to matter. When we find ways to show off our differences, to distinguish ourselves, we find

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

31

that notice. These are things that most of us say we want. Consider even this perspective on Facebook: Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now. — Mark Zuckerberg

Still, the journey from written words to voice, a form of identity, follows no certain path. It’s tremendously hard to control my voice on the screen or on a page unless I understand what makes “voice” happen. Imitation doesn’t always work well because that’s not my voice. I can isolate some voice-like things by reading and listening and imitating, but my voice doesn’t change as a result. And then there’s the question of individuality. I can try out new words, but if they are not words I normally use they are not going to sound like me. I can record myself when I speak, but writing and speaking don’t “sound” the same. (More on this question of orality later.) Speaking and writing don’t necessarily follow from the same intentions. If you are like me, then, you are probably looking for another way in. For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. — T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot again puts us in mind of an idea like “voice,” framed here in terms of the individual talent. That is part of a poet’s job: to recreate the world in novel metaphors—something that our conversations about voice, perhaps ironically, do not accomplish. This sense of voice as an individual attainment, though, represents only one theory of what voice is. In various communal settings, as I argue in the next chapter, voice is better described as a social attainment—a set of learned practices that establish one as a member of a group—and different groups require different performances of voice.

32 

J. S. SCHMIT

Taking apart the Metaphor of “Voice” Much excellent work has been done on the importance and the efficacy of written voice. It stands as a metaphor for the writer’s presence, the writer’s possession of a stance, and the writer’s membership in a discourse community. In their excellent review of the scholarship on written “voice,” Sperling and Appleman (2011) capture the key theories that shape our understanding of voice: one group of accounts suggesting that voice as individual accomplishment, and other set of descriptions saying that voice is a social accomplishment. The most compelling aspect of this theoretical review, though, traces voice as a product of Bakhtinian dialogic, centered by social convention and simultaneously stretched by individual creativity. This dialogic understanding of voice explains the concept beautifully at the same time that it underscores the near impossibility of its conscious creation by all but the most skilled among us. One of many ways to explain voice is James Gee’s (2005) conception of “situated identity.” As the term suggests, the writer’s voice is simultaneously the property of a single personality and the product of intense social modeling. Social patterning is, in Bakhtin’s terms, a centripetal force, drawing individual speakers and writers back to inward toward the shared practices of the discourse community. Individual creativity, the hallmark of Chomsky’s conception of language use, pulls outward against social convention, literally going (linguistically, at least) where no person has gone before. This principle of creativity lies at the heart of most linguistic explanations of the outputs of grammars: it advances an argument that any sentence of any length is probably unique and original, not just to its speaker but the entirety of the language within which it is conceived. Writers and speakers, then, are disposed by their implicit knowledge of grammar toward individuality. While this idea of having a “voice” seems reasonably clear, even to less experienced writers, the construction of a written voice remains difficult even for accomplished writers. Still, having a “voice” is personally desirable and ideologically important. Maybe in the US this imperative derives from our deeply American belief in individualism. Or maybe it grows out of a need for ownership: of our ideas, our beliefs, our perspectives, or just from our capitalist ideology—our private ownership of the means for producing intellectual property. Identity work is one of the primary goals of day-to-day language use. We also believe deeply in the value of personality. As writers, we learn quickly the value of personal appeals for creating

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

33

credibility among our audiences, and we recognize as well the usefulness of making people laugh, or getting them to raise their eyebrows. In teaching and assessing the degrees of individuality that we understand as “voice,” we say that writers need to have an “ear for language.” Written voice is something that we hear in our imaginations. The trick in successfully using this metaphor is to isolate something that can be heard when there is, in reality, no sound. Often we think we “hear” the nuances, the rhythms, the tones of everyday speech: familiar words, idiomatic expressions, regionalisms and other vernacular features, and bits of non-­ standard grammar. These, by the way, are often the same features of language that young writers have been counseled against. This understanding of a writer’s individuality begins with the claim that “voice” is a logical if ill-fitting metaphor for our awareness of the author of any written discourse. It is logical because we know that such discourse is always the product of human agency, and thus we imagine a set of sounds that this discourse might represent. It is ill-fitting because too much of what we know about voice doesn’t transfer across the speech-to-­ writing gap. To demonstrate, imagine an enumeration of the components of voice: pitch; loudness; length of sound and syllable; stress and intensity from combinations of these sound features; timbre; tone; intonation; and variations of pitch, loudness, and length. There a host of acoustic features that readers must imagine if they hope to hear a “voice’ in written discourse—and unfortunately, it will more often be the reader rather than writer who creates the imaginary sounds of a written “voice.” (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  The metaphor of voice

34 

J. S. SCHMIT

Metaphors for identity in writing are important, and so they guide the questions that we ask. For example, when we talk about the need to “create” one’s own voice, what tools are at one’s disposal? What features of an actual voice can be reproduced as written text? And what skills are required of any writer who words to affect a “voice” on the written page? Using the metaphorical model above, we can test the possibilities for replicating each of the characteristics of a literal voice with an imagined written voice.

The Components of “Voice” This exercise above—listing and then transferring the characteristics of the human voice—follows the patterns of what cognitive linguists would label as a transfer metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). In understanding any such metaphor, we use a selective process for transferring those characteristics of our “source domain” (the ‘known’ side of the metaphor) to its target (the abstract term we wish to understand better). So, for example, when someone says, “My little brother is a pig,” we first recognize the presence of metaphor and subsequently imagine the characteristics that we believe the metaphor to suggest: in this case dirty, gluttonous, sloppy, and perhaps fat. We do not, on the other hand, imagine four legs, cloven feet, a flat snout, pointed ears, or a tail. It seems that more characteristics fail to map onto the target of this metaphor than do, but there is also a ready explanation: this metaphor addresses behavior more so than physical features. This explanation also applies for the metaphor of voice, but the determining principle of transfer is less clear. So, what parts map and what parts don’t? Consider the following aspects of voice and the means we have for replicating them in written language. Tone: word choice, sentence length, sentence structure, and textual features such as italics, boldface, underlining, and font color can signal the writer’s feelings about the content of a written message. For the most part, though, writers have only limited license to use textual features. More frequently, they create tone through diction and syntax. No pestilence had even been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. — Edgar Alan Poe

Stress: In speech, stress in English results from a combination of suprasegmental features: pitch (fundamental frequency), length (duration), and

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

35

loudness (amplitude). Pitch can be replicated by use of italics, but the connection is not an inherent one. We can approximate length by using extra letters, usually with vowels and some continuant consonants such as s or r. And loudness can be represented by writing in all capital letters. In expository writing, though, these textual features are generally not accepted unless they are used for a specific purpose. Strange things we travelers see! ejaculated Robin. — Nathaniel Hawthorne John is a physician, and perhaps (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind -) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Emotion: Word choice and punctuation can be used to signal the writer’s emotional state, as can syntactic features like sentence length and incomplete sentences. This excerpt for Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods provides an example of the ways in which the narrator’s ironic perspective is transmitted through images of the incineration of a village in Vietnam: There was a trick to it, which involved artillery and white phosphorus, but the overall effect was spectacular. A fine, sunny morning. Everyone sat on the beach and oohed and ahhed at the vanishing village. “Fuckin’ Houdini,” one of the guys said. (p. 65)

Idiom: These figures of speech connect image to place and persona. This short excerpt from Ethan Frome requires little explanation. A homespun voice relates details about a New England farm that has fallen into disrepair. The speaker’s dialect and register also reflect the local culture: That Frome farm was always ‘bout as bare’s a milkpan when the cat’s been round; and you know what one of them old water-mills is wuth nowadays. — Edith Wharton

Gender: Here we flirt with stereotypes. Years ago a sociolinguistics professor told our class that if a man uses the word “darling” (assuming a heteronormative context) he had better be talking about his significant

36 

J. S. SCHMIT

other. Only women (again assuming a heternormative context) are licensed to use that word as an adjective. Tag questions (“That was a wonderful movie, wasn’t it?”) have also had gender norms projected upon them. A conscious subversion of gender norms is also possible in the formation of written voice. Consider the following passage from Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. In the introductory paragraph of one chapter, she sets the scene for a masculine performance by her female character: It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined a body and soul and pointed them diving fearlessly—then you likely wouldn’t get hurt, and you’d stop the ball. Your fate, and your team’s score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it. (p. 17)

This passage is crucial to Dillard’s creation of her narrator. It sets our expectations for the whole story and explains the narrator’s unusual response to getting caught after throwing snowballs at cars. In the voice of another persona, the whole of the story might fail. Selfhood: Explicit expressions of identity emerge from the writer’s words. Like Dillard’s fearless childhood self or McPhee’s erudite commentator on mustaches, any writer with a clear sense of self amplifies the message of a text by couching that message in terms of self. Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words? — Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing. — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

As to the construction of selfhood in writing, great thinkers and writers disagree. Consider, for example, this famous passage from Emerson’s “Self Reliance”: There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

37

good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. (Paragraph 2)

Emerson’s argument gives primacy to the individual scholar. He remarks further on the importance of speaking one’s own truth: “Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought” (Paragraph 1). Sometimes we believe that we are not very good at using language for creating new worlds or human responses to them: Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. — Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Just a few paragraphs ago I used the metaphor of construction. How can we take that metaphor apart and map it onto writing practice? Does writing have a foundation? Probably it does, in the language practices of a recognizable speech community. Does it have a familiar form? Typically it does: one provided by familiar genres or by conversational rituals. Can we identify the building materials? This comparison is the most difficult and most important, for once we know what a voice is made of we have the potential to start building. This metaphor seems productive, then, but the idea of “building a voice” involves a difficult process of conceptual blending—combining two ideas that normally exist in separate mental spaces— but we’ll explore this idea later. In written language, voice can be linguistic sleight of hand, and if this claim is true then developing writers need to learn linguistic magic tricks. We might imagine temporarily that all need to understand that the creation of voice is all about misdirection and deception. We do not, in fact, sound like the voices we write, and yet we all pretend that we do. This is implausible, though. Even polished public speakers can’t perform what they write without first making accommodations to the genre of public speech, which sounds more formal than casual speech but doesn’t sound like formal writing. When asked, “What moves you most in a work of literature?” Cynthia Ozick answered in this way:

38 

J. S. SCHMIT

Language as the well of image and feeling. Nabokov rather than Hemingway. If less is more, it is nevertheless also loss. And the easy vernacular is deprivation.

Besides noticing a clear orality to the style of this answer—these words appeared in the July 16, 2016 edition of the New York Times Book Review— we see personal judgment and expression of taste. Ozick identifies the connection of great authors with their particular use of language, and in doing so she exemplifies the same connection between her voice and her belief in the efficacy of consciously considered language. Positioning: as a rhetorical exercise, I tell students that their success at defending an argument depends heavily on the ground that they choose to stake out and defend. We enact the human position spectrum, a familiar activity in which student writers line themselves up according to the vehemence of their advocacy or defense of a position. In doing so, students can see the positions that make up the continuum of possible positions. Traditionally, this is done to see what manner and number of concessions a writer is willing to make to the opposition. Seen another way, though, this is a matter of character definition, an exercise in reasonableness, a series of statements our who the writer is, what stances a writer will compromise and what the writer will absolutely hold on to. In the end, it is not the position that matters but the expression of that position. Here, the use of qualifiers—what grammarians refer to as modality— can quickly expose the degrees to which a writer is committed to a claim. The following preliminary thesis from a student essay exposes the degree to which this writer remains unwilling to commit to a purported policy outcome: While some people might respond to an increase in tax rates by possibly giving more to charity, and in various ways this would seem to lead to somewhat better social engagement.

The words some, might, possibly, various, seem, and somewhat all carry hints of the indefinite. Each of these terms suggests a degree of concession, on the one hand setting up a kind of positionality, while on the other hand hinting at a lack of precision in that position. Personality: at the heart of this rather fraught term is the source of what some might eventually call voice. These are the qualities that make someone distinctive and interesting. Thus, at the heart of personality lies

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

39

difference. Consider the information we gain from these descriptions, offered by both the characters and narrator of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: ‘We’ve had an ACCIDENT!’ the children screamed in a frenzy of delight. ‘But nobody’s killed,’ June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car, her hat still pinned to her head but the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off the side. (p. 19)

Background: underlying difference is a set of distinctive experiences, most of which have been acquired unconsciously. We grow up reflecting on those who surround us, not thinking about how we are the same or different from this important group of people. Biases: the myth of objectivity causes us to imagine that these might not exist—at least within the confines of academic writing. It is hard to live in the US at this point in history, though, without seeing the stark divide that social beliefs create and the differences that we enact because of them. Bias is everywhere, and to deny our own is simply to lie. As Dwight Bolinger said, “Language is not a neutral instrument. It is a thousand ways biased.” (1980).

Conclusions We can view the producers of written language in a variety of ways and from a multiplicity of viewpoints. Chomsky would argue that individuality in language is inherent because language is inherently creative. Montaigne once showed us that the essay—the act of attempting to make meaning by reflecting on our lives and our problems—expressed the most intimate and immediate concerns of the writer. Even Pinker, who searches for something universal in his exploration of style, suggests that writers inherently occupy social and institutional roles as they write. This commentary will continue in the next chapter. For now, though, we can return to the notion that a writer’s identity is a thing personified. The idea of something “personified” is quite a powerful one. We say things like, “She is grace personified!” (page) This is what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson would call an “ontological metaphor,” one that grants being to an abstract idea, gives it shape and movement and an ability to act

40 

J. S. SCHMIT

in the world. When we say that the writer of a text needs to be personified, we mean much the same thing: the writer needs to be given personhood, some human reality in the mind of the reader. In rhetoric classes we talk about “constructing” the writer for any given text. This entails an exposition of the writer’s values, beliefs, logical acuity, biases, worldview—most of these accomplished indirectly but nonetheless established in the readers’ imaginations. Once readers have a sense of the person on the other side of a communicative exchange, they can imagine themselves entering into genuine human discourse. Until that point, they see themselves as reading words off of a page. The difference between our typical conception of personification and this activity of creating the writer is the difference between the physical and the imagined person that we know exists on the other end of the message. Metaphorically, as in the case of literary study, we think of personification as the attribution of physical human features to a concept. A movie that plays for a long time has “legs.” Compassionate ideas have “heart,” and almost every organization has a “head.” Walls have ears, caves have mouths, hurricanes have eyes, mountains have feet, and cigarettes have butts, but these are not the forms of personification that give rise to personality. Definitions of identity and personality run closely parallel, and we may ultimately decide that they represent a distinction without a difference. Their manifestations in written discourse, though, give us much to consider if we mean to describe the ways in which writers produce identities for themselves. The following chapters will each explore written identity by different conceptual means.

References Baca, J. S. (2001). A place to stand. Grove Press. Bakewell, S. (2011). How to live: Or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Other Press. Bolinger, D. (1980). Language: The loaded weapon: The use and abuse of language today. Longman. Campbell, J. (1992). Controlling voices: The legacy of English a at Radcliffe College 1893-1917. College Composition and Communication., 43(4), 472–485. English, F. (2011). Student writing and genre: Reconfiguring academic knowledge. Bloomsbury. Freeman, W. J. (2001). How brains make up their minds. Columbia University Press.

2  CONSTRUCTING WRITTEN IDENTITY 

41

Frey, O. (1990). ‘Beyond literary Darwinism: women’s voices and critical discourse. College English, 52(5), 507–526. Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis. Hooks, B. (1988). Talking Back: Thinking feminist. Boston, South End Press. Kinneavy, J. L. (1971). A theory of discourse: The aims of discourse. Prentice Hall. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. Lillis, T. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing. Edinburgh University Press. Nye, A. (1990). Words of power. Routledge. Pinker, S. (2015). A sense of style.: The thinking Person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. Penguin. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge University Press. Sperling, M., & Appleman, D. (2011). Voice in the context of literacy studies. International Literacy Association. Sullivan, J. J. (2014). Best American essays 2014. Houghton Mifflin.

CHAPTER 3

Written Identity as Cultural Expression

Writing Ourselves into Discourse Events Sometimes in our haste to get our writing projects underway, we start acting our parts before we have learned them. If we were to think of ourselves as actors preparing to perform a part, we might imagine specific strategies for preparation. We might ask about our motivations with a scene. We might reconstruct the lives of our characters in the times and places before the present scene began. We might consider the ways in which our character gets along with others, acts differently in different settings, changes the mood when the topic of conversation becomes unconformable. The list of these acts of preparation can go on and on, but we know that what we say and how we say it relates in very specific ways to the acts of communication that we find ourselves in. When we think of voice or identity in writing, we are tempted to think in terms of stylistic features like vocabulary, syntactic patterns, personal perspective and attitudes, seriousness or humor, and attempts at uniqueness of character. We imagine writers with a clear ‘voice’ to be well versed in discourse conventions, and this is probably accurate, but in most cases this identity is not an individual or a personal accomplishment. Instead, it represents a mastery of socio-cultural discourse patterns, and thus is a social accomplishment. To some extent, discourse analysis can provide tools for close analysis of the features of language that give rise to our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_3

43

44 

J. S. SCHMIT

perception of a written voice. It can reveal the socio-psychological features particular discourse participants habitual use. These features signal the manner in which these participants imagine themselves interacting with other language users. They give evidence of power relations between and among members of discourse groups. They establish contexts within which discourse takes place. They demonstrate familiarity with various discourse genres. Discourse is also the product of knowledge systems. Corporations, governmental bodies, educational institutions, religious institutions, and professional associations, to name just a few, encode their concerns in patterns of language that tend to reproduce themselves. In other words, these patterns are built around the expectations of their members and users, and thus they produce genres that encode their typical ways of knowing. This connection might bring us back to theories of the sociology of knowledge: the relationship between what we know and the social milieus within which we create and exchange this knowledge. What this means for everyday consumers of discourse is that a written identity is to a large degree an application of a system of knowledge. Consider, for example, a student who is in the process of mastering the conventions of academic writing. This writing is an application of a particular and tightly regulated form of literacy: what some call ‘essayist literacy.’ While teachers of this literacy might frequently encourage and reward this accomplishment of a literate identity, we too frequently imagine the accomplishment of this skill to be an expression of individual talent. What it more likely suggests is an acquisition of the discourse patterns in which the writer has become immersed.

Some Misconceptions Concerning Voice We can speculate at length about the sources of constraint that appear sometimes to be baked into the design of formal education. For example, many teachers buy into the various definitions and standards of scholastic achievement. Advanced Placement (AP), for example, under the leadership of people like David Coleman, is less a curricular choice than a means accomplishing college credits. (I have nothing against that goal but would challenge its priority among other educational outcomes.) To succeed in AP one must submit to the mechanics of its testing program. For instance, students drill and practice to excel at “one-draft, only-draft” essays because this is a behavior that the test will require them to master. On the other

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

45

hand, such practice runs absolutely contrary to most of what we know about successful and productive writing pedagogy. And I don’t blame teachers for buying in, since not to do so would pit them against school administrators, parents, and even the students themselves. The College Board doesn’t just have an agenda; it is an agenda. External forces of scholastic achievement create phenomenal inertia. But what are the unintended outcomes of this manner of constraint? In some odd (though doubtless unintentional) way our educational system perpetuates the idea that children should be seen and not heard; that is, we should see their writing and examine its external trappings but we should not hear their personalities resonating behind the words. The young people I work with, for example, disparage the possession of opinions, largely because they have been advised by teachers and elders that opinions are things of little value and great danger. Given some unsourced distaste for opinions, young people find themselves in the position that Steven Pinker named earlier: pretending to be nascent experts, forced to report information and not allowed to be purveyors of argument. One wonders how in the current political climate—or in the midst of “fact-free” political discourse—they can see this change as anything more than a fiction foisted upon them by an educational system that is not interested in including them in its conversations. Thus, the pretend world of school-sponsored writing becomes that much less realistic. Add to this positioning the belief that the primary purpose of early grades education is acquisition—of knowledge and of basic skills—and you have a recipe for disembodied, decontextualized, depersonalized discourse. Such discourse is, so we oddly seem to believe, the safest kind. It entails little if any risk, and some say it seems developmentally appropriate. It is absolutely insufficient for preparing young people for higher education. By contrast with secondary-school writing, the largest single question in higher education is this: what will you do with the world’s ideas? Simply reporting them—especially in an age of new and ubiquitous media—is an activity of small value. Young people need to demonstrate that they can analyze, apply, evaluate, and synthesize these ideas: not just from logical, data-driven perspectives but from rational perspectives as well. Here we can turn to the work of Antonio Damasio to find the crucial distinction (2005). Purely “logical” analysis can be accomplished by people with brain lesions in the prefrontal cortex, at the same time that they make mistake after mistake because their decisions are not informed by

46 

J. S. SCHMIT

emotional referencing. Rational thought, Damasio argues, comes from the gut, not from the head. So, how do allow students to tell us what is in their guts—how they arrived at the end point of an analysis—if they are not allowed to express what they feel about the subjects of their writing and why? As soon as they do so, they are imposing their own perspectives upon the world and its most noteworthy subjects. Rather than teaching young people that such perspective is inappropriate, we need to impress upon them that this personal and cultural perspectives are essential. It is direct evidence of their presence in the world of ideas, and this presence is a crucial component of “voice.”

Language as Collective Action This idea comes to us first from Emile Durkheim (1912), who sought to explain the ways in which social categories (time, space, principles of logical thought, etc.) grow out of common experiences among people. These, Durkheim said, are socially defined and exist within social milieus. Symbolic representations are thus the products of intense social interaction. This idea is also reflected in the linguistic work of Edward Sapir (1921), who argued that the purpose of any language is to encompass and represent the crucial concepts of any society. Like Saussure and others, this theory reflected a belief that because language is shaped by social interaction it is also a means by which social interactions are reified and represented. Language, then, makes social interactions and the activities that comprise them more real. When we look at knowledge as the product of social and cultural practice, we can examine the ways in which both language and the representations of knowledge find some common expression in the collective use of discourse. The shapes and patterns of language in its conventional uses and common settings are part of our accumulated knowledge of the means by which we communicate. These patterns, in turn, give rise to expectations about the ways in which language expresses those ideas that we have created through common practice and social interaction. This conclusion, then, is what leads us to ethnography as a practice for understanding where any given ‘voice’ will find its place in our shared discourses. To find a way into the practices that give structure and meaning to our communication and social practice, we can use ethnological methods. These methods are generally descriptive and thus enable students of

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

47

cultures and societies to make inferences how knowledge functions and how it is communicated in social settings and discourses. As we generalize about communication and the discourse patterns that frame it, we can begin to see how individuals might not only participate but also mark their participation in discourse. The conventions that give discourse structure can thus be consciously exploited, managed, or even subverted to show how any piece of discourse is located within social and cultural practice. Ethnography allows us to see the underlying rules of discourse, and also the ways in which these rules serve to locate us within its practice. The following set of concerns for creating a written identity is largely modeled on the work of Dell Hymes (1964). While his ethnographic model of communication includes sixteen separate concerns, the following seven concerns allow for a fairly thorough description of communication across cultural and social settings. As with any model of ethnography, the first objective is to describe carefully the features that we can observe within communicative interactions. After developing a comprehensive description of any communicative practice, the investigator can make inferences or generalizations based on patterns within the discourse. These generalizations reveal the cultural rules that underlie communicative acts. Hymes’ model had sixteen components that can be applied to many sorts of discourse: message form; message content; setting; scene; speaker/ sender; addressor; hearer/receiver/audience; addressee; purposes (outcomes); purposes (goals); key; channels; forms of speech; norms of interaction; norms of interpretation; and genres. (Hymes 1974, p.53–62). In particular, this adapted model is set up to assist writers in inventing an identity, a persona that can be presented to the discourse community that contains its potential readers. In something that also resembles Burke’s dramatic pentad (source), this model reflects the various parts of theatrical action. The writing has a time and a place. It addresses a situation, often one framed by conflict or controversy. It imagines a group of people with divergent ideas and concerns. It plays out within a set of structural or emotional constraints, and those constraints reflect the expectations of an audience. Surrounding the action of the discourse are sets of social and cultural norms—implicit rules that we need to observe and follow if we are going to be perceived as credible. In each chapter of this book, then, this model appears by way of a more specific set of questions and concerns that tell us who and what the main character wants in any communicative act.

48 

J. S. SCHMIT

An Ethnography of Written Identity With this general description as background, then, here are some questions that might help a writer to construct a written identity. Each set of questions relates to some matter of interest to the community within which a communicative act takes place. Setting: Where is the community in which this discourse takes place? How does this setting establish expectations for this discourse? At what point in time is this discourse taking place? All written discourse has a setting, and sometimes there are multiple settings. Is the discourse community located in a specific region or area, and, if so, who does this regional identity attach to the writer of the piece? How does the timeframe for the piece influence the way in which it is written and establish the identity of the writer? Are there social conditions or social contexts that provide an identity for the writer? For example, within what social segments or strata does this writer work, and how does the writer’s positioning within this social setting help to establish an identity? By articulating the where and when of a communicative act, writers can place their identities in recognizable contexts. Participants: Who is involved in this discourse exchange? Who is the writer? What people belong to its intended audience? Whose words are being cited or included within this discourse? What are their relationships with each other like? What cultural imperatives do these people bring to discourse of this kind? Communicative acts have minimally two actors, but discourse that is offered to the public will have multiple participants. We can then conceive of a writer as playing a role in any act of discourse: an expert, a peer, a provocateur, a supplicant, a mediator, or a mentor, just to name a few possibilities. Likewise, those who receive written discourse also play roles within the discourse community. They may be equals, or they may find themselves in a one-up or a one-down position. They may be decision-­ makers, stakeholders, impartial observers, or information seekers. Imagining written communication in terms of its human participants causes writers to see themselves as engaged with the other members of the community, allowing them to refine their language and communitive gestures in a manner similar to their face-to-face interactions. Topics: What ideas, events, or people are discussed within this discourse? What does this community believe to be important or noteworthy?

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

49

Within any community, the things we talk about are likely to be familiar, and the same is true for the ways in which we talk about those things. Some topics are controversial, others mundane, and still others inviting and pleasant. As members of a community, we have relationships not only to people but to the things that we participate in and talk about. In addition, we assign values to the things we talk about: important or unimportant; privileged or open; sacred or secular. Our beliefs and values concerning these topics are central to the ways in which we position ourselves to talk about them. Goals: Toward what purposes do these participants communicate with each other? How do these goals shape the discourse? Even when we don’t think we have a purpose for discussing something, we probably do. We think of speech acts as goal-directed. We may want of convince an audience about the truth of something, and we may even want to encourage them to act upon the topic at hand. We may simply be seeking to make contact, to get to know someone better, or to forge a connection that links us to other people. We may simply want to entertain them, or maybe we want to discomfit them in order to encourage change. We might simply want to provide information or perspective. In all of these goals, writers find themselves negotiating a role or a persona that fits the hoped-for outcome of their communicative acts. Genre or channel: How are the members of this discourse community accustomed to talking or communicating with each other? What expectations do they have of the writer? For the treatment of this topic? For the language used to communicate these ideas? What structures are typical of this kind of discourse? It is fascinating to recognize the degree to which we all exhibit proficiency in the manners of writing we participate in. Young people today have invented their own rules for communicating by text or other computer-­mediated written forms. At the same time, students actually push back against what they think to be excessive innovation in forms like the essay, largely because they have found security in constraints they have learned about this model for discourse. All of us find that our personal demonstrations of this expertise with channels and genres helps us to establish a communicating self: one that connects to other actors and the expectations they bring to all communicative acts. Tone or manner: What feelings or emotions are conveyed through the language of this discourse? (Seriousness, humor, irony, other purposeful affective signals.)

50 

J. S. SCHMIT

Tone is sometimes difficult to describe but it is always present and frequently important within the ways we communicate. A single word that is too formal, phrasing that is too roundabout, a statement of fact that is too direct, an implication that attaches to a person who would rather disown it—all of these features of communication will be quickly noticed and just as quickly assigned an emotional response. Among these responses we quickly grasp the relationship of the topic at hand and the appropriateness of our communicative manner. This explains our recognition of satire or irony; we recognize an obvious mismatch of message and intention, manner and purpose, or feeling and significance. When Swift proposed that it was baby-eating time in eighteenth century Dublin, people got it: there was no appropriate time for eating babies, then or ever. His speaker was a carefully and purposefully constructed ironic persona, one against whom the audience quickly turns. Discourse norms: What unwritten rules apply when one engages in this form of discourse? What roles does expertise play in the construction of the message? How and when is evidence cited? What rules of logic inhere in the discourse? What cultural expectations attach to the writer and the audience? In what ways, consciously or unconsciously, does gender shape this discourse? How might social class enter into considerations within this discourse? The social construction identity fascinates even the most reluctant observers because of we have all be its subjects. Somehow, we all want to know what happened to us. We have learned who to be, how to be, when to be, but seldom why to be. We immediately recognize actions and words that are out of line with social and cultural expectations. If we think about it, then, we can think of communicative acts that are equivalent to getting on a crowded elevator and facing the back of the car. We don’t cuss in church, use the phrase “kicked the bucket” at a funeral, or use negative epithets in the presence of those against who they are directed. We know better, even when we can’t say how we have come to know it.

Exploration as a Source of Voice Working in a prison setting with incarcerated men in a class called Writing the Personal Essay, my partner and I drew on a series of topics from Montaigne’s journals, and then we expanded the list. The questions were not momentous, but they were authentic: real questions that real people wonder about, and all of them required a personal perspective. The point of this exercise was to demonstrate that in order to answer life’s real

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

51

questions, we need to explore the ways in which these questions reflect on our own lives. This requires the writer to present an authentic self in search of original answers. The following questions, many drawn from Sarah Bakewell’s (2011) account of Montaigne’s reflections on the essay and its purposes, became the subjects of student discussions and then actual essays. They are all productive for engaging students with big questions and they all require the construction of a written identity. • How should we cope with fear of death? • How can we get over the loss of a child or a beloved friend? • How do we reconcile ourselves to the live we are now living? • How do we forgive ourselves? • How do we forgive others? • How can we avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument? • How do you cheer up a friend in despair? • What should you do if you overhear someone being given bad advice? • How should we deal with a bully? • Where does meaningfulness reside? • How can we be good to those we love? • What is the best way to keep loving someone? • Where should anger go? The first thing that should be obvious to anyone discussing this list is that there are no correct answers—better answers, perhaps, but no right ones. The second thing is that students will have answers to most of these questions. In order to provide those answers in a credible way, though, they will not be able to rely on allegedly factual data, nor will they be able to generalize beyond their own points of view. Most will have examples from their own experiences that will inform the ways in which these questions might be answered. Another important observation that our writers embraced was that they now had standing. Their words mattered. Their experiences were worthy of the attention of their audiences. They recognized quickly that these questions were complex. Some even felt humbled at being asked. But in being asked they realized status. The complexity of the task required not a simple “opinion” but an extended consideration. These questions matter, and the writers who stepped forward to answer them saw their importance.

52 

J. S. SCHMIT

How, then, are these questions best answered in a way that draws out a writer’s identity, and how will that writer know that an identity has been achieved? The following questions from a simple discourse analysis model will help writers frame their responses and shape their identities: • What social or cultural conditions must the answers to these questions address? • Within what context are these answers being offered? • What is the relationship of the writer to the audience? • What means or methods of interpretation are available to both writer and reader? • What ways of seeing and interpreting answers to such questions likely to differ from writer and reader? • What is the audience’s orientation to each topic, and where does that orientation come from? • How might the audience’s beliefs or values concerning each topic differ from those of the writer? • How might the conditions under which the audience reads such an essay differ from those of the writer, and why is it important for the writer to understand and address this difference? • What will make the answer to each of these questions authentic and honest? • What is it about the answer to each question that might produce unique or original perspectives? • How might the writer present answers to these questions that will strike the audience as sincere and helpful? Addressed sincerely, any of the questions listed above will produce important perceptions, and all of them will be more forthright if offered from the writer’s own point of view. Here again, using a set of ethnographic categories will also enhance the analysis of writer’s identity. These questions, in addition to those above, might guide a more conscious breakdown of the writer’s projection of self: • Where and when would such a discussion take place? (Setting) • To whom is the writer directing this answer, if to anyone? (Participants) • What is the nature of these concerns, and where to they reside in our experience? (Topics)

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

53

• What is the purpose of answering these questions? Is it to actually solve a problem, or is it simply to see possibilities of thought? Is the purpose to offer assistance of give reassurance? (Goals) • How does one imagine actually creating and transmitting a message of this kind? Is this and essay or a letter or a preamble for a conversation? (Channel) • What expectations will the reader have for this manner of exploration? (Genre) • What emotional content or presentation will be most conducive to the desired reception of this message? (Tone) • On what forms of collective language practice most heavily rely, and how will the memory of that practice assist the writer in framing the message appropriately? (Discourse features) • Are there conventional ways of interacting in language that might help the writer imagine the shape of such an essay? A conversation? A monologue? An interview? A letter? (Framing)

Turning Observations into Voice The purpose for answering questions like those above is to take stock of what we know about discourses and our collective place in them. When we are able to see this voice as an expression of collective action, we can make conscious stylistic choices that reveal our identities to our readers. Once we have a list of answers, we can start looking for patterns, making inferences, and generalizing about the features we are describing in our inventory of communicative possibilities. Because this ethnographic investigation describes not only the writer but the audience as well, we can more easily see identity as social practice and thus imagine the linguistic performance in which we both play our roles. If we do this work conscientiously, we eventually arrive at the self-concept. Consider the following excerpt from a first-year student’s personal narrative and think about the ways in which she presents herself to her audience. This is the opening paragraph of the first version of her essay: The tall trees covered the surrounding mountains of a rural Guatemalan village. In the distance you could hear the river splashing against the nearby shores as the animals bathed in the afternoon sun. My family was gathering around each other getting ready to start the prayer and the feast. The place was straight out of a painting, but then there was me laying down on a hard

54 

J. S. SCHMIT

wooden bench. It was the last Saturday of my trip in Guatemala and the first time I was meeting the majority of my family so they prepared tamales to celebrate. Despite this, I was unable to enjoy the feast and was looking forward to going back to my grandparents' place. The place was breathtaking, sure, but I was reaching my limit. My body was starting to give up on me and I felt like I was going to pass out any second. Not even I could tell if it was the bug bites, the change in food, the rough two-hour car ride or just plain hunger but one thing was for sure, I was tired as fuck.

The writer, Jasmine, seems to know a lot about the role she plays in the telling of this narrative. The setting for her story is an idyllic Quatemalan country village at a family gathering. The details of her story include a mountain range and a flowing river on a sunny afternoon. The environment seems tranquil and beautiful. Then suddenly Jasmine tells us about her physical discomfort, not even knowing herself what its causes were. The participants in the narrative itself are Jasmine and her family members, but for this first telling of story the participants are members of a first-year writing class at a diverse urban university. They share this task and this genre, as well as the purpose of providing feedback on this personal narrative. The topics revealed within the story include the daily activities of a family on vacation, a reception meal, observing the surrounding countryside, and then the contrast of this tranquil scene with her lying on a bench. The details she provides seem simple enough. Up to this moment we imagine Jasmine as a dutiful family member, until she suddenly she shows herself to be a somewhat defiant teen. I, at least, was quite surprised by her use of the phrase “tired a fuck.” This short and stark description quickly changes the mood. Jasmine’s goals in telling the story are to entertain her audience while revealing the conflict she suddenly encounters. She works to increase her audience’s tension by showing us the seeming severity of her sickness. She frames these goals within the model of a three-act narrative, the genre that she employs to create strong expectations among her audience. The tone of the story is one of contrasts: the splendor of landscape juxtaposed against the misery of a day that seemingly won’t end. We can all identify with the stresses of a long day in a strange place, but “tired as fuck” shocks us into a new revelation of the main character. Nothing Jasmine did or said in class prepared me or her peer group to think of her as someone defiant enough to drop the f-bomb in a college essay!

3  WRITTEN IDENTITY AS CULTURAL EXPRESSION 

55

The discourse norms that Jasmine uses in telling the story don’t seem to match the personae of either this observer of this panorama or her classroom self. As the main character in this narrative, she appears to be someone about to partake in prayer and ritual. And then comes the contrast: her family in an imaginary painting and herself lying uncomfortably on a wooden bench. Her sentences are simple and declarative as they set us up to be shocked by the difference between the expectations she has foregrounded and the unpleasant reality of this moment. It is easy to imagine that Jasmine has conducted an informal or implicit ethnography of communication as a set of guideposts for her storytelling method. It is likely that most writers take a similar inventory of the characteristics that not only define their writing styles but define themselves and their identities as well. This discussion related above will, with luck, serve as an invitation to make this process conscious and explicit. As they consider the possibilities for creating a written identity, they may want to think systematically about the elements of discourse that are available to them.

References Bakewell, S. (2011). How to live: Or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Other Press. Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. Penguin. Durkheim, E. (1912). Conclusion, Section III, “Elementary Forms of Religious Life”. (Joseph Ward Swain, Trans.) p. 435. Accessed https://web.archive.org/ web/20130312023652/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41360/41360-­ h/41360-­h.htm#Page_427 Hymes, D. (1964). Introduction: Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist, 66(6), 1–34. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/668159 Hymes, D. H. (1974). Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. University of Pennsylvania Press.

CHAPTER 4

Identity and the Levers of Power

Identity and Affiliation The study of “voice” in writing presents a conundrum. On the one hand, we use this term to signify our ability to project an identity into a piece of written discourse: the characteristics of its creator, its spirit, and its ethical bearing. On the other hand, a serious look behind this construct suggests that this presence is deeply fictional, an idealized representation of a self or an identity that cannot exist outside the system that makes it possible: a language. When we consider that language is a social institution, we understand that voice is socially inscribed and only recognizable as a product of that institution. Institutions, in this sense, are comprised by dense groups of individuals who are bound together by common purpose. With that definition in mind, the central question arises: to what degree can individual members of such a group—a society, a network, a social class— distinguish themselves from the whole of which they are inextricably a part? More importantly, how much privilege is derived from this membership, and can that privilege be extracted and made portable? There is also this consideration: the accomplishment of a written academic voice admits its holder into the discourses of power. Some might balk at that word, power, but when we look at the divisions in United States society today we quickly recognize the access given by such a voice. We can even claim that our nation is segregated not just by ethnicity or

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_4

57

58 

J. S. SCHMIT

race but also by educational accomplishment within social segments. Of course, a bachelor’s degree is not essential to the accomplishment of voice, but as a site for this accomplishment colleges and universities represent the place, both literal and figurative, where access to power is bestowed. Institutions of higher education are in the business of creating and bestowing distinctions, and these distinctions impart power. That power is inscribed in the discourses that we practice in the academy. Immediately, then, the tension begins for those charged with educating writers. On the one hand, it is essential that writers working within the discourses of power can demonstrate their membership. That’s a fancy way of saying that they need to appear to belong. They need to be recognizable as members of the institutions that confer power. They must seem confident and competent in the practices of language within these institutions. The belief behind these practices may extend beyond what Noam Chomsky (1986) described as linguistic competence—a complete and perfect knowledge of a language system distinct from the particularities of its use—but it certainly begins at that point. From there they can move on to the mastery of various codes; more about that later. Most importantly, though, they can enter the conversation as credible participants. For teachers of writing, even those who don’t particularly want to tinker with the identities of their students, the primary goal is to confer the trappings of membership to societies most powerful institutions. When the attention of writing teachers turns of “voice,” though, the focus is frequently on the students’ accomplishment of a distinct and individual identity. We can ask about the degree to which this goal is real or merely an extension of a particularly American ideology. Our national heritage seems to entail a belief that we are distinct, separately recognizable, empowered and encouraged to distance ourselves from the masses of our contemporaries, even our peers. Here things get confusing. I recall, for example, a trek across the campus of major land-grant university in the early 1970s. The counterculture of the 60s had instantiated itself in the dress and habits of the tens of thousands of students present on that campus, leaving them without further need to consider the results of these simple choices of what to wear and where to shop, how to carry books, how to wear their hair, and so on. Out of this ideological backdrop walked thousands of countercultural participants, all seemingly indistinguishable from each other: wearing (perhaps ironically) olive-drab military jackets, bell-bottom jeans, Vasque hiking boots, and carrying army-surplus rucksacks. Having separated themselves from the mainstream, they were

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

59

nonetheless in uniform. Cultures have ways of insinuating themselves without a great deal of conscious notice. At the same time, though, the trappings of these cultures and their social institutions, which include language, exert significant influence. The symbolic power of a language like Standard English (SE) is quickly recognizable and undeniably powerful. Those who learn the codes of power, even if they share a minority membership, become distinct from those who don’t, and one can argue that this latter group constitutes the mainstream. This last point is easy to miss once one has been initiated into the social institutions that set the standard for language use. Various sources claim that while SE is a prestige dialect, and thus a desirable educational goal, it is also a minority dialect. According to a recent article in The Guardian, the percentage of UK residents who actually speak RP may be as small as 2% (Barton, 2018). If this figure is even remotely accurate, it reflects the high degree of distinction available to those who possess membership in the communities where RP is spoken. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2018 only 30.4% of Americans over the age of 25 held a bachelor’s degree. While that number has grown by 4% over the previous ten years, it still represents a significant minority of the US population. We should ask, then, to what degree these numbers reflect a new power elite, and we should ask subsequently what it is that makes this group recognizable, both to each other and to the remainder of the population. In instrumental terms, then, the purpose of having an institutional identity is to become distinguished (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 122). When we evaluate “voice” in student writing we too frequently invoke some notion of distinction. Those who accomplish this distinction are able to translate it into power and currency. Possession of the social status afforded by Standard speech and writing can be converted into social capital: the ability to exploit social connections and networks for social gain. Trust, cooperation, and reciprocity are natural byproducts of these networks, and each conveys a capacity to set a person apart from those without prestige or distinction. On the other side of the power spectrum we find speakers from lower social classes whose language is less aligned with prestige or might be marked by features that do not align with social capital. They may even be configured in ways that deny prestige. Bourdieu, following Labov, claims that some speakers consciously fashion their language to avoid the appearance of “airs and graces” (p. 86). Adopting a formalized voice, one that conforms to both academic and economic “markets,” feels unnatural to

60 

J. S. SCHMIT

members of lower social classes. However, by rejecting a formalized voice these speakers and writers may leave them voiceless, or at least constrained in their ability to meet the demands of the places in which they would hope to participate linguistically. While they may possess vibrant and distinct voices in discourses that reside outside the institutions of schooling, the constraints of academic discourses will likely lead to their rejection by readers whose expectations are bounded within those discourses. Bourdieu’s reference to academic discourse communities as a “marketplace” for linguistic varieties underscores the evaluative processes that continually distinguish SE speakers from nonstandard speakers.

Individual Identity and Group Identity To what extent, then, can a recognizable individual identity become visible through the use of a system (here, a language) that takes its shape through the continuous interaction of its collective membership? Ferdinand de Saussure commented on this question in his Course in General Linguistics (1916): In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental. Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual. It never requires premeditation, and reflection enters in only for the purpose of classification… . (p. 14)

The distinction Saussure makes here relates to his famous separation of langue from parole: language from speech. The former, he says, is a social institution. The latter consists of the concrete products of that institution: individual utterances. To the extent that these utterances are the products of the system that enables them, can they be meaningfully distinct in their form or in their application of rules? Somehow, our understanding of written voices is focused exactly on such a distinction. One could answer the question above by saying that voice doesn’t change language but rather attempts to employ it in distinctive ways. The individual accomplishment of written voice might be the equivalent of a signature style or move in sports: all soccer players kick the ball, but David Beckham’s free kick style was one of kind. Like a language, games are governed by rules. No matter how free in form a game of soccer might

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

61

seem, the structure of its play is never changed by the players. The same is true of language. As Saussure noted, “Of all social institutions, language is least amenable to initiative. It blends with the life of society, and the latter, inert by nature, is a prime conservative force” (1972, p. 74). We absorb the rules of language—linguists say we acquire rather than learn them— without conscious awareness or effortful study. Admission into the discourses of power, all of which here are conducted in SE, requires those whose legacy language is not SE to learn SE by effortful study if they want access and membership. Still, the balancing act between individual performance and adherence to a set of institutional rules typifies the challenge of creating a voice. Every writer must maintain a fidelity to the rules while demonstrating a discrete identity. The communicative acts that writers perform require a linguistic repertoire that is broad enough to accommodate a variety of personal and ethical positions. Barbara Johnstone frames this challenge in relation to Saussure’s theory: This focus on performance is analogous to the way, in Saussure's terms, the notion of parole, or language as actually used by individuals, interrupts and provides a foil for the notion of langue, language as an ideal system. From this perspective, one must think about ‘how individuals create unique voices by selecting and combining the linguistic resources available to them. (2000, p. 417)

Johnstone’s claim that voice results from a series of choices draws our attention to the need. We might think in terms of paraphrase for simple examples. An accomplished performance of identity requires an awareness of appropriate and effective choices in language. The metaphor of a “foil” works nicely here, especially so because it is also a pun. One on hand, a foil enhances the qualities that bring two ideas into contrast: here the social institution of language and the individual practice of a distinct individual writer. At the same time, a foil frustrates the efforts of an opposing force. This conflict between institution and individual lies at the heart of our conundrum. These observations on individuality deserve more attention. While writing undoubtedly requires effortful study, the material of writing—as Wallace Stevens called language in “Adagia”—derives from the environments in which speakers acquire it. To the degree that language confers social status, that status is likewise acquired, frequently without effort, by

62 

J. S. SCHMIT

those who grow up in more privileged social classes and who are immersed from an early age in the social institutions associated with power and privilege. When writers act to create meaning, they are enabled or hobbled by the extent to which they have acquired the material out of which meaning can be assembled. To the extent that language constitutes a legacy, it represents an inherited capacity rather than the reward of study. A legacy speaker of SE is inherently privileged within institutions that value the habits and rules of this dialect. Of course, few people speak a single dialect in a single register by a single code. These variables—along with contextual settings, figurative usage, syntactic repertoire, specialized vocabularies such as jargons and argots, and a host of other idiosyncratic language practices—might provide the mechanisms of “voice.” Here I recall Chomsky’s claim that we are so interested in the differences among speakers that we tend to ignore the overwhelming similarities among speakers of languages. Because languages are completely naturalized within our ideologies, our ways of seeing and interpreting the world, we tend to take diverse and fascinating operations of language as givens. When grammatical rules are uniformly observed, they are invisible: it is only when language use departs from this uniformity that we seem to recognize it. We should ask the degree, then, to which the accomplishment of an individual “voice” depends on strategic deviance. In the absence of this calculated difference, the social and linguistic norms of our speech and discourse communities hold sway. Labov (1972), Fairclough, and Bourdieu all make the point that language practice is deeply socially conditioned. Practiced writers can manipulate the conventions of discourse production, but the essential rules of practice are well established before language production happens. Fairclough (1989) refers to the operating system for language production as a set of “member resources” (p.  24), which consist of the members’ knowledge of language, representations of the social worlds in which they live, their values, beliefs, assumptions—in short, the ideological constructions that they carry with them daily. Because language is a matter of social practice, it is also that case that language itself represents a set of cognitive processes that determine the ways in which we apply social beliefs. Any attempt, then, to separate discourses from the social settings in which they are used will ultimately be fruitless. Language is always and necessarily interpreted according to social conditions. Pierre Bourdieu articulates a series of positions that align well with Fairclough. Social institutions, Bourdieu argues, are symbolic structures

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

63

that exercise symbolic power because they are structured and because we believe in them (p. 166). We believe in these structures because they operate within a context of “logical conformism” (Durkheim’s term) that gives us a standardized conception of things like time, space, cause, and rationality. In other words, we hold to a consistent set of beliefs that reflect our constructed reality. These institutions—and the discourses that occur within them—provide our dominant impressions of the world and its operation, including its sources of power, its conventions for “correct” practice, and its conditions for membership. A less direct means for interrogating these social institutions is to simply describe them and imitate their practices. To a large degree, this approach may reflect our current practice, but it ignores the necessity of understanding how we interpret and explain the social practices that undergird these discourses. Interpretation requires the relationship between a text and a reader’s interaction with it. Again, we can think of this interaction in the terms that Rosenblatt provided in her explanation of transactions with a text. An explanation of discourses, Fairclough says, requires us to examine the relationship between our interactions with a text and the social conditions within which these interactions take place.

Identity as a Function of ‘Habitus’ Maybe the most important idea for understanding the symbolic power of institutions is Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus”: a set of socialized norms that guide the ways in which we think and act. Because habitus is shaped by an interaction of social norms and individual will, it varies among members of a society. This interaction accounts for differences in our perceptions about where we “fit in” or “feel at home.” Our sense of fit can have a profound effect on the degree to which we thrive or struggle in differing social environments. For those whose language, class status, and social aspirations already match those values that predominate in educational institutions, the fit will be closer, creating a sense of security and comfort. Those who develop a habitus that is not aligned with these institutional norms will experience social distance from the institution, leaving them to feel alien to it, like outsiders. A sound sociological explanation for this choice can be offered using the terms of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus. Bourdieu’s explanation of habitus allows us to account for a variety of ways of being in the world. The theory is that (like a more specific description of socialization)

64 

J. S. SCHMIT

habitus allows us to account for a series of judgments that people make about themselves and their place in world. It provides ways of talking. It reflects social class. It reflects social history. It becomes embodied—part of our gait, gestures, etc. It becomes internalized. As a value system, it affects physical and cognitive actions. These judgments are taken for granted: our judgments strike us a self-evident. As a result, we find that we feel part of everything is some settings and out of place in others. Because our linguistic habits similarly align with culture, community, and the social norms found within both, our identities align closely with the language spoken in these speech communities. Further, those identities create widely varying degrees of comfort as we move from setting to setting. I immediately think of Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary (1989) as a startling set of illustrations of habitus and its impact. In his book Rose describes young people who have little confidence in their ability to fit into a university setting, even though they are intelligent and have been admitted. He comments on a student named Bobby, who says, “‘They’re asking me to do things I don’t know how to do. All the time. Sometimes I sit in the library and wonder if I’m going to make it. I mean I don’t know, I really don’t know.” He gestures to himself and his girlfriend. ‘We don’t belong at UCLA, do we?’” (p. 4). There is obviously more to be done for students like Bobby than teaching them the trappings of “voice.” Somewhere, somehow, we have to ensure that students like Bobby can feel as though they fit in. This feeling of membership involves something of a chicken-and-egg story. The achievement of an academic voice can do much to remove the markers of distance that these students sometimes carry. Conscious attention to these written manifestations of identity can certainly help students to diminish the number of reminders that have that they reside outside the spheres of our institutions. At the same time, though, they need to address themselves directly to these markers of distance in order to remove them, and their awareness of this difference serves as a constant reminder that they don’t belong. In Lives on the Boundary, Rose recounts his own story, describing the distance he felt from the processes of learning and the strategies he used to insulate himself from a nearly identical self-doubt: I couldn’t keep up and started daydreaming to avoid my inadequacy. It was a strategy I would rely on as I grew older. I fell further and further behind… . I realize now how consistently I defended myself against the lessons I

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

65

couldn’t understand and the people and events of South L.A. that were too strange to view head-on. I got very good at watching the blackboard with minimum awareness. And I drifted more and more into a variety of protective fantasies (p. 19).

For those of us whose social class backgrounds more closely mirror the school settings that we experienced, the adoption of a school identity was far less fraught. It was relatively easy for me to imagine that these schools were made for people like me, that I belonged to the target demographic, that my expectations and those of my parents were the same as those the schools had for me. With little imagination I could see myself as one of the people for whom these institutions had been built. But I was not the person who needed instruction when it came to voice. I already belonged. I had been inoculated against the symptoms of alienation from schools. The perspective of schools, which is a human as well as an institutional perspective, deserves greater scrutiny. One of the things that make the notion of a written voice particularly problematic is that our voices reflect our values and our social history. For some people, there is a deep awareness of the distance between an academic voice and the voices that they grew up with. For those of us who come from educated, middle-class homes and communities, this distance is relatively short. For those who voices mark them as outsiders in an academic community, the distance can be quite intimidating. I’ve told stories to my linguistics students for decades now of friends who left rural communities in the piney woods or plains of Texas, only to find that they couldn’t comfortably go home again. While code selection might have given them the option to fit into either setting, a feeling of disconnection seemed to prevent them from returning to the linguistic roots—the dialects, and accents, and the implicit value systems—that they had worked hard to remove from their speech. Switching codes produced feelings of schizophrenia: an inability to inhabit a coherent personality or identity, leaving them with fragmentary selves. For those who insist that their students inhabit the values and the behaviors of the school—a specific and different ‘field,’ to use Bourdieu’s term—there is peril and responsibility. An example from a small Georgia mill-working town serves to illustrate this difficulty. These students, like those people in their families and social network, spoke a dialect in which the verb be was not conjugated. “Is” served all purposes relayed in the present tense and “was” all purposes construed in the past; person and

66 

J. S. SCHMIT

number were not considered in the choice of verb form. A teacher who spent time drilling students on the Standard English conjugation of the verb be was frustrated to the point of anger when, upon returning to school from home, her students appeared not to have learned this Standard conjugation. What the teacher didn’t grasp was that the fields of home and school were not only distant but actually opposed. Fitting in with one meant not fitting in with the other. Whether these students’ identities had already ossified or whether perhaps they were being implicitly but clearly discouraged from adopting the Standard can’t be known, but the results were clear enough: given a choice between fitting into a densely networked community—one in which they would work, socialize, go to school, play sports, and go to church with the same community of people—or standing apart through an assertion of a new identity that was foreign to this community, they predictably chose the former.

The Production of Texts As we extend the importance of theory of mind in our analysis of writing, we recognize the degree to which coherence in written texts depends heavily on our perception of a stable identity operating on the other side of any text. Fairclough views all texts as located within two additional dimensions: a set of processes by which the text is created and interpreted, and a set of social conditions that explain those processes. Fairclough’s (1989) model helps us to think in terms of intention when we read a text. We want to know what the writer hoped would result from the creation of that text. As we read, we intuit clues to the identity of that writer: a set of desires, beliefs, reasons, attitudes, perceptions, remembered points of reference, and experiences. The names Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946) pop to mind for literature students of my generation; they were the minds behind “the intentional fallacy” in literary interpretation, the belief that one could never know the specific intentions of any author. They write, “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” [p. 1015] But for most of us, there is a certainty that an author who chooses to write to us does so for a reason, and that reason is important to interpreting any piece of writing. At some point, our perception of this imagined writer’s presence takes its shape from a series of larger associations. The term “writer” has a meaning beyond the identification of a person who performs this act.

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

67

Fairclough’s model also helps us to see the choices the writer makes in producing a text. Every text in embedded within its own processes of production and interpretation, and the production and interpretation of texts is embedded within a set of social conditions. These processes for embedding texts reveal the influences that act upon both the writer and readers of all texts.

Social Conditions of Production Process of production Text Process of interpretation Social Conditions of Interpretation

As we continue to think about Fairclough’s model, we can see the effects of a writer’s identity, especially on the processes we use to create and interpret texts. If we subscribe to the idea that every writer has an identity, then our next steps are toward language ideology: our beliefs and feelings about the ways in which language is used in social settings.

The Establishment of a Stable Self Within a larger context of cognitive blending, Mark Turner, comments in The Origin of Ideas (2014) on the ways in which cultures reinforce what he calls “an abiding self:” We construct a personal sense of self, a stable identity that undergoes change. Actually, we can construct different personal senses of self, depending on what mental web is active in our brains and what is brought to mind by props in our circumstances, and still feel that, although we were different just a few minutes ago, the self we happen to be right now is utterly stable. (p. 65)

This conversation brings us to consider an important point with respect to our understanding of a self: while we can inhabit different senses of our identity, we simultaneously maintain—at the insistence of our culture—a

68 

J. S. SCHMIT

stable self that is identified with a single referent: a name. Turner explains this imperative in this way” Cultures ferociously support, maintain, and enforce such blended conceptions of an abiding self. Cultures invest a great deal of language in providing fixed names to the personal self in the blend. The name counts as a linguistic invariant, something that does not change, regardless of how it is pronounced, declined, or written, so as to indicate the cultures insistence that there is a stable referent, a person. (p. 65)

This powerful link between cultural imperative and personal projection provides one of the key considerations for establishing a written identity. We may conceive of different senses of self at different times, or even simultaneously, but our cultural grounding ensures that our identity can be stabilized by our markers of identity. Turner goes on to say that the proper name associated with the self in question can refer to many selves in many situations, including the particular variety of the language that this person speaks. Regardless of our ability to discern it, then, voice is likely to be essential, not in the practical sense that is necessary, but rather in the philosophical sense than it reflects a set of characteristics that makes writers who they are. What we know about writers and writing suggests that “voice” is a socially inscribed identity. While we might tinker a bit with those features of style that we ascribe to “written voice,” the roots of such identity markers grow far deeper than the surface features that we typically name to define this perception.

So, What Exactly Do We Mean by Voice? Sperling and Appleman offer this definition and commentary on voice in written discourse as a social construct: We began this article with the assertion that voice is a language performance—always social, mediated by experience, and culturally embedded. As we have seen, and, as Bakhtin (1981, 1986) reminded us, voice is inevitably and at once the articulation of a defined self and the animation of socially and culturally mediated activity. This perspective on voice reminds us, as we have suggested throughout this article, that voice is by its nature infused with the values and ways of being of the world of the other. Given this premise, we recognize the compelling redundancy in the claim that "language

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

69

performance" is always social. For we are always performing in the service of identifying, discovering, shaping, and asserting in anticipation of and in answer to the other. (p. 81)

The motivation behind this metaphor seems sound, since an audience’s imagined projection of the persona behind a text is inevitable, as is our desire to interact with that persona. Theory of mind (ToM) explains this phenomenon nicely, since our models for discourse necessarily include an imagined persona, another mind, on the other side of any communicative gesture, but more about that later. Our understanding of reading as a transaction with a text also reinforces this schema: even when we encounter monologues, we envision another language user—an encoder, a persona, a character, or a role—that fits the communicative model of the moment. We read intention into any discourse routine: a set of underlying emotions, beliefs, value, and assumptions that give purpose and meaning to a text. While some of us might read a set of assembly instructions from IKEA as having no discernable human source, even though a brief reflection on purpose exposes a human impulse behind the text, someone somewhere made a significant effort to ensure a buyer’s success at putting together something like a piece of furniture. Any business that relies on repeat customers has to approach the task seriously, and while some of us might like a human voice to guide us as we go, simplicity and minimalism will more likely prevail in the creation of those instructions, and those characteristics also describe a voice. Much of the pedagogical focus on voice in writing classrooms actually seems to be aimed at middle-class Standard speakers who are encouraged by teachers to adopt a set of fairly superficial language behaviors to enliven or animate a prose style that might already reflect the social and cultural memberships these writers enjoy. In part, this point of focus centers on an individual accomplishment of voice, one that can be imagined, like idiolect, to reside with a specific, individual user of language. The term “voice,” as it is used in the conventional writing classroom, seems to address something optional, voluntary, temporary, mutable: a thing to be put on and taken off like clothing. In our attempts to help writers understand it, we create a series of beliefs about it. For example, we approach it as a thing that can be impersonated. It can be ventriloquized. If there is a value in imitation—a value that might, for example, translate into better grades for writing students—the exercise of imitation can leave writers at a significant distance from the text they create and the intention

70 

J. S. SCHMIT

they mean to convey. If we begin at the point of imitation we discover that there is little distance between an ersatz voice and parody, with all of the unintended consequences that parody entails: humor, exaggeration, style divorced from purpose, action separated from aim, and language detached from the phenomena that give it meaning. If “voice” is to be authentic, then it must be an essential function of identity—but whose identity? Identity creates boundaries within which we must remain, because without these boundaries our identities are unclear, indistinct, perhaps even equivocal. Much as Americans like to think of identity as self-determined, autonomously constructed, and tailored to the needs and want of individuals, our identities are far more likely to be the products of the social institutions that shape them. Institutions such as education, social class, family, religion, political affiliation, professional rank, and economic status all create criteria by which we can be judged. All of these institutions likewise shape the language we speak. Our linguistic varieties assign to us varying degrees of authority, success, respect, and value. Dunstan and Jaeger summarize the effects of dialect succinctly: “Language is a form of privilege that students and faculty members bring with them to campus in that there is a common standard language ideology—the belief that there is a single, ‘correct’ form of English spoken by educated individuals” (Dunstan & Jaeger, 2015; Lippi-Green, 1997; Milroy, 1987).

So This Is What We Really Do When We Teach an Academic Voice Bourdieu attributes a great deal of symbolic power to the languages of institutions. In his discussion on language and the settings within which languages exist, he comments explicitly on this silencing effect of a Standard language “marketplace,” associating it with censorship: This linguistic ‘sense of place’ governs to the degree of constraint which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse, imposing silence or a hyper-controlled language on some people while allowing others the liberty of a language that is securely established. This means that competence, which is gained in a social context and through practice, is inseparable from the practical mastery of situations in which this usage of language is socially acceptable. The sense of the value of one’s own linguistic products

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

71

is a fundamental dimension of the sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the social space. (p. 82)

Attention to written voice, while it might seem benign on its surface, becomes a source of censorship. Bourdieu referred to the functions of institutions as “acts of social magic” (p. 125). This “magic” is the effect that J. L. Austin (1962) theorized in this description of speech acts, especially what he called “performatives.” [source] The whole of Austin’s theory focuses on language as something we do, but performatives especially have the power to change reality. When the officiant at a wedding says, “I now pronounce you [and then names the relationship between the marrying couple],” reality changes for all those who have witnessed the ceremony. It is at that moment that language changes reality. So how does this relate to voice? We can frame an answer in terms of language as an act of identity. Each time we assert our identities in an act of writing, we add a crucial component to the readers’ processes of meaning making. Thinking back to Fairclough’s claims about the importance of “member resources” and the processes by which a text encodes meaning and guides its own interpretation, we can see how the intentional creation of a text is an act of individuality, of distinction and distinctiveness, an assertion of self. When these components of a text—stance, role, persona, uniqueness, character—coalesce in the imaginations of an audience, the writer emerges as an agent of meaning. Given that extremely important purpose, those of us who teach writing are certainly justified in addressing our students’ attention to issues of identity and agency, no matter which metaphor we use to name this presence of the writer. The acquisition of an academic voice is a result of institutional force, one that brings with it the magic of ritual on one hand and the effect of a gag on the other. At the conclusion of his discussion of “rites of institutions” Bourdieu poses this question about power: could rites of institution, whichever they may be, exercise their power…if they were not capable of giving at least the appearance of a meaning, a purpose, to those beings without a purpose who constitute humanity, of giving them the feeling of having a role or, quite simply, some importance, and thus tearing them from the clutches of insignificance?

72 

J. S. SCHMIT

An authorized voice—an academic voice, for example—is thus associated with power, but this should not suggest a “power of language,” a term far too abstract to bear much meaning. The power conveyed by language is the power that social institutions attribute to their discourses. Powerful communities and institutions possess powerful discourses, and to the degree that any speaker masters the features and concepts of those discourses, that speaker possesses and can exercise power. This may be the more important impetus behind the teaching of voice in academic settings.

Subject Positions and Identity One of these alignments of language and community, what Bourdieu described in his explanations of “habitus,” is determined by the relationship between a discourse and the social structures that control that discourse. Schools are one such social structure, and Fairclough addresses this situation in his discussion of “subjects” and subject positions. Students and teachers become students and teachers by enacting these roles. This idea is consistent with a more general claim that derives meaning and reveals identity as a form of action. As Fairclough puts it, “Occupying a subject position is essentially a matter of doing (or not doing) certain things, in line with the discoursal rights and obligations of teachers and pupils—what each is allowed and required to say, and not allowed or required to say, within that particular discourse type. At the same time, Fairclough says, we are constrained as social subjects by the types of discourse in which we participate, and to that extent we are passive participants in those discourses. So, what does this mean for a writer attempting to frame an identity? Our participation in these social structures results in our reproduction of the structures that pattern our discourse. Fairclough says, “it is only through being occupied that these positions continue to be a part of the social structure. In simpler terms, when we take part in activities such as “writing a paper” we adopt the role of the paper writer within the context of a school setting, and thus we are expected to play the role as it has been defined. As “writers,” students have the freedom to establish their own stances relative to the topic at hand; to select and organize the evidence they believe supports that stance; to choose language that fits within the contextual frame (more about Charles Fillmore in Chap. 7); and they get to occupy a position within a rhetorical spectrum. What they write, on the other hand, must be consistent with what Lillis (2013) calls “essayist

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

73

literacy.” That is to say that we all know by our experiences in academic writing that certain things about writing are clearly right or wrong. This latter set of values was clearly pronounced by a group of incarcerated students who participated last year in a course I taught called “Writing the Personal Essay.” Most of these students were involved in for-credit higher education programs that required conventional writing assignments. Our personal essay course, on the other hand, was offered through a not-for-credit creative writing program, and the readings for this course were examples of a tradition that honored the practices and intent of Montaigne’s essays. I had thought this shift in purpose would represent a small deviation from the essay-writing norms with which the students had become familiar. I was surprised at the severity of the dissonance this shift created for them. I mention this example in part because many of these students had little exposure to essayist literacy prior to their incarceration. At the same time, though, in their conceptions of their identity they were all diligent and dedicated college students. Their professors on the for-credit side had made the rules of this literacy abundantly apparent, and the assessments of their written products directly reflected that discourse practice and their roles within it. To the degree that different social structures define different discourse norms, it worth asking how the institutions of incarceration match up with the institutions of education. Even setting aside the SCHOOL IS PRISON metaphors, the congruence of expectations for essay writing in these different contexts was striking. The incarcerated students did not see themselves as agents in the construction of discourse—free to modify its conventions and adapt its rules to their own purposes—even though Fairclough concedes that this is one aspect of the subject role they occupy. They saw themselves as deeply constrained by the academic conventions that they had quickly internalized in their college writing experiences. They had been taught to reproduce a set of expectations consistent with educational literacy practices, and they found it difficult to make personal and rhetorical choices that placed them outside the conventional discourses of an educational institution. For me, the degree to which their exposure to the social institutions of incarceration was now informing their conformity to essayist literacy remains open, but this example illustrated powerfully for me the degree of constraint that discourse positions bestow upon those who occupy them.

74 

J. S. SCHMIT

While David Coleman makes a number of questionable claims about the literacy needs of students, this one is important because it seems to capture a sentiment popular among teachers of writing: your purpose in school-sponsored writing is to demonstrate that you have done your work and have learned what you assigned to learn, as English’s research verifies (2011, p. 109). This point of focus, as Lillis (2013) notes, results in the privileging of a restricted set of opportunities for doing identity work in writing. Essayist literacy, Lillis says, privileges one specific kind of textual unity (oriented to a theme or argument), one relationship between writer and reader (‘anonymous,” “neutral,” and “disembodied”), one identity (middle-class, rational, and possibly male), one aesthetic value (rational and logical), one form of language (the Standard), one shape for a text (linear and transparent), and one learning trajectory (from novice to expert). To the degree that essayist literacy pervades education and specifically school-sponsored writing, it severely limits students and their ability to develop and express their identities in writing. The social forces that cause the essay, and thus essayist literacy, to constrict and to become impersonal, rational, and disembodied, constitute influences too large and too complex for this present study, but we can clearly see the results. Identity work in academic writing, especially at the secondary level, is too frequently discouraged and disparaged. I begin nearly every composition course I teach by asking how many students in my class have been taught that they should not use the first-person point of view. A vast majority of students indicate that this restriction at one point or other had been built into their expectations for written academic discourse. In terms of language education, of which writing instruction is an integral part, Fairclough argues that our focus is “exclusively task-oriented”: it is the job of students to use language effectively, thus focusing on the effects of language use. Toward this end, it is the job of teachers to equip students to perform a set of tasks. As Fairclough points out, though, this use of language is “also a matter of expressing and constituting and reproducing social identities and social relations, including crucial relations of power” (p.  237). Recognizing this claim, we become aware of a larger purpose within writing instruction and critical language study: to prepare students to understand and participate in what Fairclough labels “social orders of discourse” (p. 17). So, what do we mean when we say that we want our students to “have a voice” in the discourses they practice? Do we mean that they should have equal access to discourse within the social

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

75

structures of its practice? If we answer this question affirmatively, then how do we provide this access? One answer would be to provide explicit instruction concerning the means of discourse production, but this would require us to address another claim by Fairclough: that “orders of discourse are ideologically shaped by power relations in social institutions and in society as a whole.” This method for examining discourses would potentially create significant tension in a typical English classroom, which is the most frequent venue for language instruction. Such investigations are certain to bring us and our students face to face with the nature of capitalist power and the social institutions that instantiate it. While education is undoubtedly political, we appear to prefer an interpretation of our social institutions for education as neutral, objective, impartial, and politically disinterested. Critical language study makes this fiction difficult to protect. On the other side of the power spectrum we find speakers from lower social classes whose language is less aligned with prestige, or might be so featured as to deny prestige. Bourdieu, following Labov, claims that some speakers fashion their language consciously to avoid the appearance of “airs and graces” (p. 86). Adopting a formalized voice, one that conforms to both academic and economic “markets,” feel unnatural to members of lower social classes, leaving them voiceless, or at least constrained in their ability to meet the demands of the places in which they would hope to participate linguistically. Bourdieu’s reference to academic discourse communities as a “marketplace” for linguistic varieties underscores the evaluative processes that continually sort Standard speakers from nonstandard speakers.

This Is What We Really Do When We Teach an Academic Voice Bourdieu further comments on this silencing effect of a Standard language “marketplace,” associating it with censorship. He says this: This linguistic ‘sense of place’ governs to degree of constraint which a given field will bring to bear on the production of discourse, imposing silence or a hyper-controlled language on some people while allowing others the liberty of a language that is securely established. This means that competence, which is gained in a social context and through practice, is inseparable from the practical mastery of situations in which this usage of language is socially

76 

J. S. SCHMIT

acceptable. The sense of the value of one’s own linguistic products is a fundamental dimension of the sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the social space. (p. 82)

Attention to written voice, while it might seem benign on its surface, becomes a source of censorship. Bourdieu referred to the functions of institutions as “acts of social magic” (p. 125). The acquisition of an academic voice is one such institutional rite, one that brings with it the magic of ritual on one hand and the effect of a gag on the other. At the conclusion of his discussion of “rites of institutions” he poses this question about power: could rites of institution, whichever they may be, exercise their power…if they were not capable of giving at least the appearance of a meaning, a purpose, to those beings without a purpose who constitute humanity, of giving them the feeling of having a role or, quite simply, some importance, and thus tearing them from the clutches of insignificance? (p. 126)

An authorized voice—an academic voice, for example—is thus associated with power, but this should not suggest a “power of language,” a term too abstract to bear clear meaning. The power conveyed by language is the power that social institutions attribute to their discourses. Powerful communities and institutions possess powerful discourses, and to the degree that any speaker masters the features and concepts of those discourses, that speaker possesses and can exercise power.

Conclusion The questions of Fairclough’s member resources and Lillis’s identity stability extend deeply into this examination of written identity. Member resources include not just the rules of language but rather that set of strategies that community members use to make and encode meanings in language. It is important to recognize also that these strategies or “resources” represent a form of implicit knowledge. In Bakhtin’s terms, much of what we teach and value about writing is determined by institutional designs: the forms of literacy that dominate educational, social, and political settings. The most salient example for teachers of writing is what Lillis (2013) and English (2011) call “essayist literacy.” Its forms inscribe a variety of constraints that those within the academy have naturalized within our

4  IDENTITY AND THE LEVERS OF POWER 

77

ideological frames of reference. One result is that we cease to see the highly particularized set of values inscribed within our writing practice and our efforts to get students to reproduce those values. Among these are the need to write about a single unifying point of rhetorical focus in the style and persona of an “essayist”; a set of normative conventions for organization and formatting; the identity of an expert (even when they are novices) in the role of a performer; a disguised identity using a variety of impersonal forms (third-person point of view, passive voice, nominalizations); and sets of specific disciplinary orientations and concepts (English, 2011, pp. 109, 111). On one hand, the contemporary academy espouses the importance and centrality of student identity, as inscribed in race, gender, ethnicity, gender identity, and social class. On the other hand, we insist on practices that level these identity markers in student writing. A simple example can be found in our insistence on Standard Written English, a linguistic variety most closely identified with middle class speech and values. We justify this preference on the basis of it universality; we describe it at times as a lingua franca. We also justify this preference on the basis that it is less likely to incur social or cultural bias within institutional settings such as commerce, government, education, or the justice system. We explain deviations from this variety in terms of “error,” which necessarily implied the “correctness” of standard linguistic forms. Conformity, then, becomes a central value in the assessment of writing within educational settings. This is all well and good, of course, so long as we are honest about our intentions: to “school” students in the practices that institutions will value—or at least find to be free from negative identity markers. Another telling perspective on our regulation of writing spaces is seen in our aversion to the writing practices of social media users. Mavens of literacy become apoplectic at the potential transfer of SMS practices into other settings for writing. This appears to be a generalized aversion to weakly regulated writing spaces and the conventions that are practiced within them. Perhaps one answer to our questions about institutions and their influence over us, especially with respect to our practices of literacy, suggests choosing description over prescription. Many of our judgments of literacy practice reflect the institutional orders from which our generalizations about written identity derive. Inclusivity in our classrooms and in our writing classrooms should place a new focus on human and intellectual potential rather than on rehearsal and performance, but that shift may reside

78 

J. S. SCHMIT

somewhere far in our future. Meanwhile, we can begin to interrogate the everyday effects of maintaining the institutional status quo.

References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. (M. Holquist, Ed.; & G. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans. University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barton, L. (2018, May 22). Received pronunciation may be dying out – but its passing is long overdue. The Guardian. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Praeger. Dunstan, S. B., & Jaeger, A. J. (2015). Dialects and influences on the academic experiences of college students. The Journal of Higher Education, 86(5), 777–803. English, F. (2011). Student writing and genre: Reconfiguring academic knowledge. Bloomsbury. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Taylor and Francis. Johnstone, B. (2000). The individual voice in language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29, 405–424. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1. 405 Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press. Lillis, T. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing. Edinburgh University Press. Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. Routledge. Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks (2nd ed.). Basil Blackwell. Rose, M. (1989). Lives on the boundary. Penguin. Saussure, F. (1972). Course in general linguistics. McGraw Hill. Turner, M. (2014). The origin of ideas: Blending, creativity, and the human spark. Oxford UP. Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1946). The intentional fallacy. The Sewanee Review, 54(3), 468–488.

CHAPTER 5

How to Register a Difference

Register and Its Effects Whether we think of “voice” as a social accomplishment or as an individual accomplishment, the possibility of its existence depends on the abilities of speakers and writers to exploit language variations. Social and regional varieties often exhibit different vocabulary items and even grammatical rules, but in writing these variations are typically limited by the rules of Standard Written English (SWE). As we will see later, language codes differ in the degrees to which they elaborate messages, but they generally operate within the SWE rule system. The most accessible types of variation, though, are those created by register, or functional variation. M. A. K. Halliday explains register in the following way: Language also varies according to the functions it is being made to serve: what people are actually doing, in the course of which there is talking, or writing, involved; who the people are that are taking part in whatever is going on (in what statuses or roles they are appearing); and what exactly the language is achieving, or being used to achieve, in the process. These three variables (what is going on; who are taking part; and what role the language is playing) are referred to as FIELD, TENOR, and MODE; and they collectively determine the functional variety, or register, of the language that is being used. (1989, p. 44)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_5

79

80 

J. S. SCHMIT

Briefly, these variables indicate three separate concerns of communication. Field focuses on purpose and subject matter; mode refers to the manner in which communication takes place (either in speech or writing); and tenor indicates the relationship between the participants in the communicative act. In Hudson’s terms, field regards the “why” and the “about what,” tenor focuses on the “to whom,” and mode concerns the “how” (p. 49). Hudson also claims that we interpret differences in register as “acts of identity” (p.  49), noting that the ways in which people speak or write serve to locate them socially. For example, what some call “formal” register suggests an intentional social distance. When we address people in positions of respect, we are more formal, sometimes using titles and last names. The use of first names immediately implies closeness in social relationships, and is thus thought to be inappropriate in some settings and relationships: students in primary and secondary schools are taught not to use first names or nicknames when addressing their teachers. In this sense, register locates us all within the institutions in which we participate. These effects of register can be quickly mapped onto written identity. Lying beneath the notion of a voice in writing is a set of perceptions about who writers sound like on the page. As a matter of intention, this sound reflects the immediate needs of the writer: a projection of personality, of status, the establishment of tone, clarity about the writer’s role in a given discourse, and, perhaps most centrally, a connection between writer and audience. These situational variables control create our understanding of register, or functional variation. We know very well that register elicits key components of an audience’s response. If the register is too familiar, the audience can be quickly put off. Conversely, a formal and socially distant register misses opportunities for human connection and rapport.

Politeness, Formality, and Distance Years ago, Peter Trudgill (2001) explained the concept of register in a manner that more closely resembles what we in the US would call jargon today, referring to the occupational contexts in which they were used: the “register of law” or the “register of medicine” (p. 101). He said, “Registers are usually characterized solely by vocabulary differences: either by the use of particular words, or by the use of words in a particular sense” (p. 101). No matter their specific forms, though, Trudgill notes that registers are created by social situations. Among these differences, he points out, we

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

81

would typically find greater formality in written language than in spoken language. Formality in general serves both as an intention and a consequence of register. R.  A. Hudson adds the useful distinction between register and dialect as the difference between registers as “varieties according to use” as opposed to dialects, which are “varieties according to user” (1980, p. 48; Halliday et al., 1964). Put another way, dialect indicates something of who we are, while register shows people what we are doing. Consider for example the case of formality in language, which has the general purpose of creating social distance between speaker and hearer or writer and reader. When speakers or writers want to convey formality and all that it entails in language, they can make a variety of choices: vocabulary items that suggest professional or academic usage; pronouns that indicate or avoid familiarity (the use of “one,” for example, rather than “you”); differing degrees of adherence to the usage considered to be Standard (“This is she” for example, in a telephone conversation with a stranger); or higher frequencies of euphemism or dysphemism. All of these choices signal awareness of social propriety. With respect to formality in language and the situations that motivate it, we have to look at a complex variety of factors that influence our choices. Consider, for example, questions of kinship and their impact on formality. One of our favorite activities in a writing classroom, for example, is to ask students to faithfully relate the events of their past weekend to two different audiences: a best friend and a grandparent. The latter situation inevitably produces greater formality. Out of respect for a beloved grandparent, and in the hopes of meeting this person’s expectations, student writers will euphemize and avoid dysphemism, use more formal words, and exhibit greater politeness. Unlike those languages that contain both formal and informal pronouns, English has no inherently polite forms, and yet most speakers and writers learn the connection between formality and politeness at an early age. In most cases, formality corresponds to respect. By contrast, formality in the presence of parents and siblings can have stunningly unexpected results, as Garfinkle’s experiments demonstrated. Garfinkle asked his students intentionally to use excessive politeness at home. While we might predict that the politeness of children at the dinner table would delight their parents, the opposite result occurred: mothers were brought to tears, and fathers became angry. The experiments strongly suggest that lack of formality corresponds to closeness and the use of

82 

J. S. SCHMIT

formality suggests distance. Suddenly faced with their children’s expressions of social distance—formality in language—parents felt rebuffed. In the case of Garfinkel’s (1967) students, the reactions of family members were brought on by intentional choices. In most cases, though, the social miscues that elicit anger of sadness are accidental. We all unwittingly choose the wrong words for an occasion, or we make incorrect assumptions about our social relationships. Teasing, for example, both assumes and signals social closeness. While any teasing can cross a line by bringing up a sensitive subject or by exposing a social vulnerability, the choice to tease someone whom we don’t know well can simply signal unwanted familiarity. Similarly, insults among familiars are typically read as humorous, whereas insults across too much social distance is typically read as hurtful. Given these possibilities for social error, we develop systems of repairs to put us back on solid social ground.

Field, Tenor, and Mode Following Halliday (1978), commentaries on register connect it with specialized vocabulary, similar to professional jargons. Jargons have a variety of purposes of their own: they name technical concepts and thus provide shortcuts in communication among those who share a jargon; they frame the conceptual field within this vocabulary operates; and they create inclusion and exclusion, marking insiders and outsiders to the degree that they are able to share these concepts. To these ends, registers have purposes: they speed up and codify descriptions for the subjects they address, they delineate discourse communities, and they specify usage and meaning. These concerns relate to what Halliday called “fields.” Within any field we can find features of “tenor”: the character of the message, which is created in parallel with the character of the speaker or writer. Here we find the distinctive qualities of an individual who creates a register by selecting the features of a message: vocabulary, syntax, and manner of address. Inherently, these features contrast with those of messages whose meaning takes its shape in a parallel register. Consider, for example, the following two questions posed by the wait staff of two different restaurants:

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

83

Setting 1: Server: “Have you decided what you would like to order?” Customer: “If I were choosing between the osso bucco and the filet, which would you recommend?” Server: “Chef does an excellent osso bucco.” Setting 2: Server: “What can I getcha?” Customer: “We’re just gonna do burgers. What’s good?” Server: “Get the bluesy. That’s what most folks come here for.”

Almost everyone knows that these questions would be asked in different kinds of restaurants. The first would more frequently exemplify the register used in a fine dining establishment, while the second would most likely be heard in a diner or other informal eatery. Most importantly, though, either one would be equally inappropriate if shifted to the other setting. What determines the register is not so much setting as an understanding of the diners who would patronize each. The tenor of the register, in other words, is tailored to the other participants in the exchange. In writing, this characteristic grows out of an invocation of audience. Differences in mode are also quickly apparent when we imagine the sound that a message would have if it were spoken. Academic conference papers illustrate this difference powerfully. Even when we hear a speaker say that she will be “reading” a paper at a conference, we seldom expect an actual reading, although that does happen. First, consider the sound of the following passage from an academic article: We ground our thinking in Bakhtinian and related perspectives (e.g., Voloshinov, 1973; Wertsch, 1991), which account for the social, cultural, historical, and political nature of reading and writing and, hence, of voice (p. 70)

This passage comes from one of my favorite articles by Melanie Sperling and Deborah Appleman. I pick on them here because they are close friends, excellent writers, and, perhaps most to the point, exceptional public speakers. If you have ever heard either of them present the findings of this research, though, you would never hear the phrase “Bakhtinian and related perspectives.” They would more likely have said something like, “We are basing our ideas on points of view first explored by Mikhail Bakhtin, among others.” The term “Bakhtinian” is a bridge too far for almost any spoken discourse. By the way, “a bridge too far” is now a

84 

J. S. SCHMIT

popular idiom for any act of overreaching, even after its original reference to Operation Market Garden in World War II has been long since lost. The use of that idiom helps to create a register that one won’t probably find in strictly academic discourse, except maybe as a historical reference. Researchers sometimes use terms like ‘formal’ and ‘technical’ to describe certain registers, and these labels combine the concerns of field and tenor. Terms like formal and non-formal focus on the “to whom”: the relationship between writer and audience. Because formality supposes distance, a formal register will signal that distance and all it entails: respect, clear social boundaries, deference, and perhaps reserve. Informality tends to remove this distance, suggesting closeness, shared values or experience, and familiarity. If a narrator wants to evoke sympathy for the main character of a story, this purpose will be better suited to an informal register. By contrast, an exploration of a serious concept or occurrence will be matched to a formal tone.

Repairs This sociolinguistic concept is easily understood, both in purpose and in method. Managing relationships is as essential component of shaping messages, and one way in which we can make these repairs is by adjusting register. In everyday speech we become aware of the ways in which choices of register miss an intended mark, and so our social barometers let us know that we need to fix things that we have said. These repairs amount to rewordings and reworkings of communicative acts related to our performances of identity. Social affiliation and social transgression can result from the same performance of identity. Placing that performance in the wrong context, however, can have quite negative results. For example, imagine a conversational exchange like the following taking place on a street corner: Speaker 1: “Hey you, what time is it?” Speaker 2: “Excuse me. Where you speaking to me?” Speaker 1: “Oh. I’m sorry. Do you have the time?”

Even in the highly informal interactions of strangers in the US, this kind of interaction is fairly frequent. Speaker 1 simply asks Speaker 2 for the time but for whatever reason fails to establish a proper role in doing so. The statement is too informal, and thus it comes across as presumptive,

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

85

suggesting an obligation on the part of Speaker 2 not only to answer the question but also to accept a “one-down” role: a position of lesser status in the exchange. In most of our experiences, we would expect Speaker 1 to take the “one-down” because he is the person making a request and thus signaling a need. This question about social appropriateness, social status, and their place in conversational interactions leads us to information about the ways in which speakers—perhaps all people—interpret language in the context of differing social settings. Conversational repairs don’t seem to require much conscious attention, but they provide a window into our expectations about how our social interactions are structured and how these structural features differ across settings. These kinds of interactions can vary dramatically depending on social class affiliation, regional identity, gender identity, or markers of ethnic affiliation. After years of living in the South, I felt comfort when someone called me “Darlin’.” My wife, whose family identifies strongly with New York City, finds this habit to be nothing short of transgressive. These same identity performances are thus marked by personal background socialization. The key point, though, is that we have ready-made interpretations waiting to be placed upon these discourse performances. As part of our “to whom” considerations, we can think in terms of social differences and the roles they create for us. Start, for example with the following scheme for social ranking: Position of the speaker

Position of the hearer

One-up Equal One-down

One-up Equal One-down

Our general view of the possible match-ups within this scheme either suggests equal positioning or a complementary matching of one-up and one-down. Conversations between peers, for example, involve equal status. Because this match allots equal standing to both, we don’t typically see evidence of power difference. Formality will be decided by setting (field) rather than esteem (tenor). Friendly conversations use features of informality, while more professional exchanges will evince decorum and propriety. Asking a favor, on the other hand, normally requires a person to adopt the one-down position, thus putting the second person in the one­up. Conversely, supervisors might consciously assume a one-up position to emphasize a need for compliance by the people who find themselves in the

86 

J. S. SCHMIT

one-down. In addition to these possibilities, we have probably all seen two people fighting for the one-up (in fact, we call this “one-upping”). The result is almost always competitive and frequently seems petty. Two people fighting for the one-down (we might think in terms of excessive deference) can produce a tone of obsequiousness or unction. The relevance of repairs in our exploration of register appears whenever one perceives that someone has gotten the terms of an interaction wrong. In our everyday conversations, repairs might be motivated by a recognition of inappropriate formality or some lack of it. They might result when a person adopts the wrong social role in an interaction. For example, a repair might be requested in exchanges like the one above involving a request to know the time. Asking favors of others typically requires us to take the one-down, but demanding to know the time signals ownership of the one-up. Hurtful or inappropriate information might also give one cause to ask for a repair, although today this frequently leads to refusals to offer a repair: “Sorry!—not sorry.” The common element in these situations is an error of register. One might ask how repairs figure into writing and written voice, since direct contact with audience seems essential to requests for repairs in everyday speech. In reproduction of implied speech, or implied conversation, the concept of correction remains possible if the writer creates a situation in which language appears to be taking shape in real time. For example, consider these hypothetical renderings within conversation: If you believe that such an occurrence is plausible—hell, even possible— then you have entered the realm of vivid imagination. What if I were to offer you fifty dollars—no, let’s say a hundred—do you mean to tell me that you wouldn’t be interested? Suppose that you wore that outfit into the Ritz Carlton—or make that just any respectable restaurant—they’d probably ask you to leave.

Statements like these would be constructed for purposes of emphasis. The words between the dashes ask a reader to think in conversational terms, or in terms of language appearing spontaneously and immediately needing to be corrected. It would be unusual for such utterances to appear unless the writer were actively constructing a reader’s participation in an imaginary exchange. Such imaginary corrections, on the other hand, are

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

87

not wholly without use. For a writer purposely working to create a voice, such imaginary utterances would appear to signal an intentional creation of written identity.

Examples of Register in Some First-Year Personal Narratives Like many teachers of first-year composition, I typically begin each class with a three-act personal narrative. The structure is familiar most students, as is the purpose, and the genre allows the writers to be themselves; there is little internal motivation to put on a school-appropriate identity. With respect to register, then, these writers have permission to ignore the formality of prototypical academic prose. The resulting student voices reveal a lot about what students have learned to that point about capturing their thoughts in their own words. So, how does register figure into student writing. Anytime we recognize elements of formality or informality in writing, we can think of a writer’s creation of a personal in response to a particular situation. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a personal narrative written by Evan. As you will recognize quickly, this is not a story that one would typically see in school-sponsored writing. My heart pushed against my rib cage as I pulled up an ever so slight incline into the parking lot. Shoes loose, palms sweaty, moms spaghetti. I was as ready as I would ever be. I can’t believe this kid, he stole from us and really thought we wouldn’t care. And now he wants to fight us? What a dumbass. Let’s get it. He was more than ready when we got there. Jumping joyfully at the sight of my Subaru, he got to us before we could even open our doors. The first hit landed on my passenger side window. An odd choice to start a fight, but he got his point across. He didn’t notice me or Trenton hop out of the car. Me first, Trenton right after. His name was John. A slightly crazy looking kid from Nova Academy who turned out to be actually crazy. The owner of a dry Soundcloud and a member of a “gang” called White Disciples. He sold weed, MDMA, and cocaine. Not only did he sell bad product, he used it himself.

88 

J. S. SCHMIT

Evan is clearly a comfortable and practiced writer with a sense of his own written identity. He has a sense for the sound of the language that he crafts here. He uses both rhyme and alliteration to increase our interest in his words and phrasal choices. His syntax is sometimes incomplete, sometimes truncated, choices that enhance the tension of the story. His mechanical lapses seem intentional and in keeping with the excitement of the moment. With respect to Halliday’s definition of field, Evan’s register nicely matches the genre that provides our expectations. His vocabulary is simple and appropriate to his story, with the inclusion of a handful of specific descriptions that sharpen his message. The tenor of this prose reveals both a role for the writer and an awareness of an audience that wants to hear a good story. Evan has come to entertain. He wants to provide color and excitement to his narrative, and he enacts his role in a variety of phrases, notably those that signal the strength of his reactions to the fight:” Shoes loose, palms sweaty, moms spaghetti. I was as ready as I would ever be.” His reactions to these initial details foreshadow the reaction that his audience will experience later in the story. The mode matches our impressions of informal discourse. Evan seems to want us to imagine that he is speaking, not writing. While the story evokes humor and tension, phrases like “What a dumbass” and “Let’s get it” seem to ask us to imagine a spoken exchange. He clearly knows that he is writing, but he asks his audience to respond to something more closely aligned with speech. This passage suggests that he already has developed an identity that fits his role within this genre. He consciously shapes his informal language around figures more suited to poetry: alliteration and rhyme. To demonstrate that he was making conscious choices in this essay, we can contrast this narrative passage with the opening of his formal research paper: There There is a fictional story that reflects upon common obstacles in the Native American community. The novel is mainly set in Oakland, California and is told through the perspective of multiple members of the same family. Due to generations of ethnic genocide and racist legislation, the members of the family we follow have become isolated and unaware of each other. Some have fallen into the bottle, others deal drugs to earn a living, but they all are coping with the ramifications of historical trauma stemming from countless injustices by European settlers. There There is a novel that vividly describes the way that historical trauma causes substance abuse and impairs the ability of American Indians to grow and heal as a nationality in America.

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

89

The shift in voice within this latter passage signals Evan’s awareness that he is now engaged in a more formal academic discourse. Again, the field suggests a good genre match, but the tenor is created to is created to match the conventions of more formal writing. The contrast between these passages displays his ability to change registers as the situation dictates. In a different study of contrasts, we can examine the difference between Evan’s narrative style and Brandon’s. Where Evan wants to lend credibility to his self-characterization of a street-smart city kid, Brandon wants to show his prowess with written English on a broader scale. Brandon is an international student from Kenya whose self-presentation is developed around the purpose of showing us his academic prowess. This is the introduction to Brandon’s personal narrative essay, and its language establishes his identity in a story in which he is the main character. Unconventionality in a world that lives by-the-book is a concept that has always bugged me. There I was, on a warm Friday morning, thinking about getting something that I had my eyes on for so long but at the risk of soiling my spotless disciplinary record. I was proud of this feat because the school had strict rules about everything and teachers always resorted to the cane for any trivial issue. I thought about the praise I had gotten since joining the school: punctual, bright, competent, industrious and the number of times teachers would refer to me as a student worth emulating but then one glance at her: the long black hair, her bright smile, her dark brown eyes, and dimpled cheeks, got me in a sort of trance. This is one of those moment where most people say the words that almost always end up regretting, “Just this once.” Her name was Lindah and she was the swan swimming in a pond of geese. If elegant, intelligent, ambitious and charismatic did not describe her, then those words should be omitted from the dictionary. She was my sophomore-­ year high-school ‘crush.’

While it is true that the phrase “always bugged me” contrasts stylistically with the concept of “unconventionality,” most of this description is carefully crafted to idealize its subject—to enhance our awareness of his fascination with Lindah: “a swan swimming in a pond of geese,” elegant, intelligent, ambitious and charismatic.” A good description of Lindah requires a deep dive into his academic vocabulary. Without this attention to literary technique, he seems to believe that his depiction would fail.

90 

J. S. SCHMIT

Lindah does not to be found in the context of a parking lot rumble. She is a person to be rendered in superlatives. Because genre is essentially a label we give to those discursive categories that align with specific intentions or expectations, we generally see an alignment of genre and register. Personal narratives, as we see in the examples above, are normally characterized by a personal tone: a register meant to elicit a reader’s feelings of closeness to the writer and thus to the subject. In this case, though, one might call the tenor of this piece “poetic. Like other markers of social awareness, register signals to an audience that an author or speaker is cognizant of the frame within which a given subject is to be treated. For example, euphemism functions as a component of register to show a speaker’s awareness of emotional sensitivity or social appropriateness in addressing issues that require some degree of delicacy. Thus, even though register is typically generated without conscious attention on the part of a writer or speaker, it is a clear marker of authorial intent. By employing a specific register, we activate social knowledge schemas: memories of the patterns and meanings of language interactions that are performed for particular occasions or purposes. Those psychological constructs that discourse activates are key components of meaning, and so for meaning to be correctly construed we use features of a given register to place our messages within a suitable social context or communicative purpose. In reviewing the samples of student writing included above, we see a variety of “acts of identity.” Like most writers, these first-year students have a strong intuitive sense for the ways in which register enables theory-­ of-­ mind thinking. To the extent that all discourse both requires and enables readers to imagine what is in the minds of a writer, recognition of register within discourse provides powerful clues as to the identity of the person or people who address us in writing. Even when register is flat and formal, it gives us clues. The scientist enacting scientific discourse is consciously playing a role, having learned through years of careful training that one role of the scientist is to stand back from the science, to let the research speak rather than the researcher. This, too, is an act of identity. In this way, we read register as a part of the meaning. In Brandon’s description of Lindah, it is his language that gives her beauty, and by extension meaning in his conception of her flawlessness. In a rather different way, Evan’s use short and incomplete sentences of his narrative immediately signals the immediacy of his experience. Both of these framings are obviously intentional. They create visible identities for each writer, even

5  HOW TO REGISTER A DIFFERENCE 

91

when, as in Evan’s writing, the genre changes and his words serve a different purpose. For me, as their writing coach, the striking features of each of these passages reside within their uses of register.

References Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice-Hall. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic. Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1989). Spoken and Written Language. Oxford University Press. Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1964). The linguistic sciences and language teaching. Longman. Hudson, R. A. (1980). Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, P. (2001). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, Fourth Edition. London: Penguin. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whorf, B. L. (1940). Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 6

Codes in Composition: Crossing Community Boundaries

When I come there with my family everybody we see we kiss them on both cheeks, even though I don’t know half of these people. That’s how people greet in Europe and here I am kissing a dude’s cheek as scruffy as I am. Everybody is happy to see us and we all sit in the private table in the back. Chicko is my dad’s brother, he lives in Ulcinj and he runs the town basically. He’s done a lot of work with the mafia and still till this day he does some kind of work with them. He never talks about it though, I believe he’s keeping us unknown about it. —A young American writer reflecting on Montenegro.

There are a number of ways to account for the style of this short passage. It comes out of a first-year student’s profile essay, the second essay he has written in this class. His purpose is to offer a descriptive portrait of his family’s life in a small Central European town. One way to characterize his prose would be to say it is a bit like Hemingway’s: simple, direct, and brief. Another description would suggest that the writer lacks the syntactic repertoire to create variety and interest. A better answer would suggest that this writer comes from a community that ascribes value to shared information and predictable sentence forms. In my developmental writing classes I encounter this style with some frequency. For years I chalked this style up to the habits of “underpracticed” writers. My preference for more elaborate and even ornate prose had manifested itself as a form of bias in favor © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_6

93

94 

J. S. SCHMIT

of academic expression. For all those years I had misinterpreted the source of this style. In the linguistics classes I taught I had wondered about the efficacy of teaching preservice teachers about codes. As often as not, I opted to skip this discussion in favor of political and social phenomena of language that seemed more immediate: social and regional dialects, bilingualism, shifting linguistic registers and other matters of stylistic choice. All of these are important, but one day I realized that I was fundamentally missing a key causal factor of student style: community-based routines that shaped the writing of students from densely connected groups. I had been looking at these students and their writing through a deficit lens. What I mistook for lack of ability, or an incomplete socialization into academic discourse, or even underdeveloped skills in written Standard prose, was actually something that I had no business discounting: the writer’s membership in a discourse community that depended less on elaborate syntactic structures than on participation in common communicative forms. In one of those years that I chose to include language codes in my linguistics class, this awareness hit me. A certain category of writer in my own classes was recreating the stylistic practices they had grown up and that had allowed them to demonstrate membership in the social groups that raised them. I may have missed this observation because, unlike dialects, codes do not necessarily have alternative sets of rules, either syntactic or phonological. While these codes may be characterized by a smaller set of more predictable sentence structures, their rules of syntax where not actually different from those used by more practiced, more “sophisticated” writers. These codes had provided a sense of belonging, of inclusion, of membership for them as long as they could remember. It didn’t occur to me that moving away from these predictable forms might have negative consequences for their identities.

Once More to the Speech of the Place There are myriad links between the language we speak and the identity that we accept for ourselves. Without making a conscious decision, we adopt the sounds of the speech that surround us, and so we are phonologically identifiable to the members of our communities. We use the same words that these speakers use, though they may differ from those used by speakers from other places. Someone who calls a drinking fountain a “bubbler” almost certainly has some tie to Greater Milwaukee. And we structure our sentences in ways that are consistent with the speech

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

95

patterns of the groups that we identify with. This last claim provided the basis for an important observation made by British sociologist Basil Bernstein: the identification of particular language codes. Like other codes, these ways of speaking are marked by a set of standards that a social group adheres to. The code that Bernstein found most interesting was marked by sets of predictable sentence patterns that appeared to be more limited, or restricted, than those used by larger and less homogenous groups. The key to his study lies among these patterns that enable speakers to use fewer sentence structures—and, in fact, to say less overall—and this phenomenon is possible because the speakers within these communities possess a large stock of shared social and cultural assumptions. Thus, Bernstein’s work added another layer of distinction among language users: the idea of a linguistic code. These codes do not necessarily involve distinct grammatical rules; instead, they are comprised of systematic choices made by speakers, and these choices are learned from the speaker’s linguistic environment. Such codes, though, reflect the identity of the social group out of which the code emerges. Bernstein puts it this way: “The identity of the social structure, it is thought, is transmitted to the child essentially through the implications of the linguistic code the social structure itself generates” (1964, p. 57). The result of this identification with the community would also be uncontroversial today within the context of sociolinguistics, but Bernstein characterizes the consequences of social code adoption in ways that make contemporary linguists uncomfortable. He says this of codes: From this point of view, every time a child speaks or listens, the social structure of which he is part is reinforced and his social identity is constrained. The social structure becomes for the developing child his psychological reality by shaping his acts of speech. Underlying the pattern of the child’s speech are, it is held, critical sets of choices, preferences for some alternatives rather than for others, which develop and are stabilized through time and which eventually come to play an important role in the regulation of intellectual, social and affective orientation (1964, p. 57).

This explanation of codes suggests a link not only between language and social identity but also between language and educational attainment. According to Bernstein, then, codes constitute sets of predictable choices that members of some communities make when they speak. Among speakers of what Bernstein labeled restricted codes, these choices are limited to communicative strategies commonly practiced within their

96 

J. S. SCHMIT

communities. Bernstein’s sociological work on language was presented in a series of papers spanning several decades, but perhaps his most significant idea was presented in his work on social codes. Subsequent sociolinguistic studies have held to the notion that speakers of a language adopt the words and grammatical rules that they hear spoken around them. This notion is largely uncontroversial. Sociolinguists also argue that the specific language characteristics of a speech community subsequently provide an identity for speakers within that community. To the extent that the rules of a given speech community differ from other mutually intelligible forms of the language spoken—English, for example—these forms constitute varieties of the language, or dialects. These strategies build on the organized principles of communication used by social groups, even as they use grammatical rules consistent with those of the dominant culture. Because they are community based, these codes rely on assumptions about shared knowledge and language practice, and this allows them to provide a verbal shorthand that creates efficiencies (less detail and less speech overall) and privileges of social connection. In this way, they reinforce social relationships and thus become preferred over more universal forms of usage. In terms of their linguistic features, codes are not defined by vocabulary but rather by systematic syntactic choices. When speakers use a wide variety of syntactic patterns, it is difficult to predict what the pattern might produce. Bernstein defines this set of choices as an elaborated code, one marked by a less predictability and broader syntactic repertoire. By contrast, when the range of syntactic choices is less diverse and thus easier to predict, Bernstein described this limited array as restricted code. Restricted code, in other words, is characterized by a higher degree of structural predictability. These two codes, Bernstein argues, are generated by both the necessity and opportunities of social relationships. For example, members of middle-­ class communities more frequently use elaborated codes, which include more full and frequent articulation of a speaker’s meanings. This broader range of choices is more essential for community members whose social networks are less dense because they find themselves communicating with people from a greater diversity of backgrounds and cultures. Here, specific shared assumptions are less possible. By contrast, members of working-­ class communities more frequently use “restricted” codes, relying on shared cultural assumptions and particular meanings as part of their communicative strategies.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

97

The most famous example of Bernstein’s study of codes was captured in interviews with speakers from different code groups: They’re playing football and he kicks it and it goes through there it breaks the window and they’re looking at it and he comes out and shouts at them because they’ve broken it so they run away and then she looks out and she tells them off Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball and it goes through the window the ball breaks the window and the boys are looking at it and a man comes out and shouts at them because they’ve broken the window so they run away and then that lady looks out of her window and she tells the boys off. (from Bernstein, 1971, p. 203)

Code Use and Educational Attainment Language codes are not frequently addressed in postsecondary writing instruction, in part because college and university settings prize complexity and precision in language use. Also, one can make fewer possible assumptions about the knowledge base or the social norms of other speakers within this setting. Cultural presuppositions are common among all speakers of a language, at least to some degree. When we enter into conversations, we do so with a set of cultural schemas—mental models for knowledge and normative behaviors—already in place. In a conversation about “sitcoms,” for example, participants will recognize this term as a shortening of “situation comedy” and will probably have a lot of implicit knowledge how their stories and structures are shaped. This knowledge will also supply a set of evaluative standards that speakers can use to say what a good sitcom is or does. The next step in this recognition process is

98 

J. S. SCHMIT

to acknowledge that this kind of information is widely shared among people who consume this culture. The codes Bernstein describes are neither grammatical systems nor social or regional varieties, but they share some of the same motivations. They reflect a speaker’s awareness of membership within a group, and they acknowledge the degrees to which a common culture is shared. Within most social groups, awareness of the code will enable quick access to the collective knowledge shared among the speech community. To the extent that we can recognize common goals, beliefs, and values within educational communities, codes may take on greater significance. Those codes that are constrained by the language practices of smaller communities and those with dense social networks will offer less advantage in larger or more general settings like those of educational institutions. This seeming fact asks us to make predictions about the educational success available to speakers of restricted codes. Bernstein suggested that these speakers will be at a disadvantage in school settings. Restricted code is also seen by some to reflect a Whorfian perspective, explaining the ways in which language and community reciprocally condition each other. Within the community of linguistic anthropologists, these differences are well accepted; among those like Chomsky who study linguistic universals, on the other hand, this manner of distinction is thought to be unscientific. Now that scientific research has begun to establish links between language use and cognitive category formation, this opposition may diminish. Still, the Whorfian hypothesis is seen to be deterministic, at least in its stronger versions. Thus, Bernstein’s theory is not without its controversies. Noam Chomsky, for example, dismissed Bernstein’s notion of codes as “hardly worth discussing,” perhaps because these issues of linguistic performance fall outside of his research agenda. And although he probably didn’t intend this to be the case, the term “restricted code” suggests a deficit perspective. While Bernstein’s research addressed learning difficulties among working-class children, thus across social class lines, the delineations of these studies on the basis of class were seen to be divisive. The generalization that follows from this correlation of class and educational attainment characterizes working class communities as putting their members at an educational disadvantage. When the constructs of elaborated and restricted language codes were introduced by Bernstein in 1971, they were seen as a potential explanation for the relatively poor performance of working-class pupils in

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

99

language-based subjects, when they were achieving as well as their middle-­ class counterparts on mathematical topics. With respect to the effects of restricted code use in education, Bernstein explains it this way: It is a special case—a case where children can use one and only one speech system. What this code makes relevant to them, the learning generated by apparently spontaneous acts of speech, is not appropriate for their formal educational experience. But only from this point of view is it inappropriate. (1964, p. 62)

The characterization of codes as “speech systems” suggests that linguistic practices are systematic, not that language use itself is somehow inherently constrained. Within Chomsky’s competence/performance dichotomy, these are matters of performance. They reflect choices made within the larger grammatical systems of the language: those that reinforce shared social and linguistic norms. The selection and use of codes within communities correlates with social network theory, an idea largely attributed to Leslie Milroy (1987). These networks consist of what Milroy described as a web of social connections among members of a community. These networks vary in strength or density depending on the size and stability of a community. Dense networks occur where there is a high degree of “multiplexity” among members: interactions of the same people across varying social contexts. In these communities, for example, people grow up with, go to school with, socialize with, attend church with, and work with the same group of people. According to Milroy, the more dense the networks, the more resistant they are to language variation because as member density increases so does the pressure on members to maintain the linguistic norms of the network. By contrast, in the absence of network density speakers need to accommodate a larger range of social expectations and needs. For this reason, the use of a code is more individualized, built around the varying needs different speakers. At the same time, elaborated code is more universal in its applications, since it does not depend on the same degree of shared cultural information. This universality, in turn, makes this code more flexible, more suited to a variety of uses. With respect to the set of social roles that it fits, elaborated code is more complex and more varied in the perspectives that it accommodates. The result is that this code can be built on a series of weak social ties, which has its own advantages.

100 

J. S. SCHMIT

Primarily for these reasons, Bernstein saw connections between elaborated code and success in educational settings. In large part, he said, these educational goals overlap the larger goals of this code: If a speaker is oriented towards using an elaborated code, then the code through its planning process will facilitate the speaker in his attempts to put into words his purposes, his discrete intent, his unique experience in a verbally explicit form. If a speaker is moving towards a restricted code, then this code, through its planning procedures, will not facilitate the verbal expansion of the individual’s discrete intent (Bernstein, 1964, p. 57).

The place of more elaborated codes centers on groups whose networks involve connections to large numbers of people across a variety of social groups. Mark Granoveter is perhaps the best-known proponent of the advantages of belonging to broad networks with “weak ties”: complex networks with large webs of social actors. Weak ties within a speech community lead to faster change in language patterns, a greater ability of coordinate and organize social interactions, more opportunities for jobs, and greater access to resources. Social capital derives from overlaps within these networks, and it enhances the effectiveness of social interactions: the denser the network, the less it functions as a source of social capital, while complex networks promote the development of higher social capital. Higher degrees of social capital are marked by shared social norms, shared values, higher levels of trust, and greater reciprocity.

Codes and Composition Back in 1971, James Kinneavy referred to the writer’s role in rhetorical situations as the “encoder.” As we saw in Chap. 2, his intention was to name the writer’s place within a discourse situation. According to Kinneavy, the role of the writer is to encode a perspective within the language of a text. His understanding of this role is rooted in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which labels this role as ethos: the spirit of the text, its cultural origins, its historical context, and the community within which it is interpreted. Because persuasion is a human activity, relying on emotional intelligence and an awareness of readers as other-minds-at-play, this ethos creates points of focus, an emotional and rational tone, and a viewpoint from which readers can observe any subject anew.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

101

As the preceding commentary suggests, codes and the depth of the social networks vary according to the social class that people belong to. Middle-class people, for example, have less density in their social networks—that is to say that they participate with different groups of people in each facet of their lives: schooling, work, worship, leisure, and so on. For this reason, when they inhabit the role of the encoder, they can’t make as many assumptions about shared experiences; there are fewer overlaps in most middle-class communities than in working-class communities, where people tend to participate in several facets of life with the same people. Given that purpose, a writer can enhance a text by encoding information, outlook, and value within it. In other words, the task is to convert the content of any text into a coded form and, in doing so, to give that perspective substance. To better understand this encoding, we might review the possible forms that language takes as it is converted. Classifying Codes Daniel Chandler’s taxonomy of codes offers one useful model for this analysis. The first of these concerns take shape as textual codes: stylistic, rhetorical, or aesthetic conventions that we use to decode and interpret— to construct meaning for texts. These include generic concerns, a connection to our awareness of familiar frames: stories, arguments, evaluations, proposals, reports, profiles, and so on (Chandler, 2001, n.p.). Second, there are social codes: the interpretive conventions used by particular groups of people for assigning meaning. As encoders, we all rely on sets of cultural assumptions that we internalize as we are socialized into the practices of a discourse community. As Milroy points out, social commonality serves as background for discourse within such communities, in turn creating a set of normative discourse patterns. And finally, there are interpretive codes: the ideological frameworks that underlie our worldviews. These range through a variety of political constructs such as capitalism, feminism, conservatism, liberalism, racism, and populism. To some degree the textual codes that Chandler names address discourse genres. These genres are recognizable by the nature of the conventions they use, but they are flexible enough to adapt to new situations. Their flexibility occurs in their organizational patterns, their syntax, and their diction, but they continue to manifest common elements of schematic thinking. Schemas serve as mental models for organizing experience and information. They are cognitive constructs, categories to be used to

102 

J. S. SCHMIT

create associations among our experiences. Once constructed, these categories exert a powerful influence on our creation of meaning, another term that requires some definition. We begin the development of these schemas at an early age, and if scholars of language are correct, these schemas are highly resistant to change in later life. Whorf (1940), among others, notes this key consistency in this essay, “Science and Linguistics”: “We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way— an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY”. This could be seen in Chandler’s terms as a description of a textual code. With respect to social codes, we can return to Bernstein. Because codes consist of choices that speakers make and a set of options from which these choices are selected, we should expect these choices to reflect the assumptions that speakers and writers use as they approach discourse tasks. For speakers of elaborated code, the choice of alternatives is extensive because the purposes to which they put this code are more varied and anticipate a broader range of audience backgrounds. By contrast, restricted code speakers typically choose from a more limited and predictable syntactic repertoire that matches the shared perspectives found among the participants in the discourse setting they participate within. Bernstein explains these code-based choices in terms of the speaker’s implicit knowledge of social relationships: If a speaker is oriented towards using an elaborated code, then the code through its planning process will facilitate the speaker in his attempts to put into words his purposes, his discrete intent, his unique experience in a verbally explicit form. If a speaker is moving towards a restricted code, then this code, through its planning procedures, will not facilitate the verbal expansion of the individual’s discrete intent (1964, p. 57).

Bernstein posited his explanation behind these questions of intent as a commentary on the correlation between code use and academic performance. Because elaborated code can be used to address a broader range of audiences and purposes, it correlates with a more flexible identity, a more generalizable set of linguistic applications, and greater success in educational settings.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

103

For addressing interpretive codes, we can imagine the ways in which speakers use the conventions: the specific mental structures used to interpret texts. Since academic language, for example, relies less heavily on shared social and cultural assumptions, it would logically favor discourse patterns that fit a wider variety of participants, settings, topics, and goals. Within more homogenous speech communities, restricted code use enjoys a range of advantages: it is more economical, more familiar, more predictable in its structure, and amenable to shared values and backgrounds that contribute to perceptions of identity. These differing settings align with differing sets of interpretive assumptions. In describing one his two codes, Bernstein puts it this way: In the case of restricted code (structural prediction) the speech is played out against a backdrop of assumptions common to the speakers, against a set of closely shared interests and identifications, against a system of shared expectations; in short, it presupposes a local cultural identity which reduces the need for the speakers to elaborate their intent verbally and to make it explicit. (p. 60)

This notion that shared assumptions leads to a simpler and narrower range of linguistic forms is consistent with theories put forward by Sapir (1921). Underlying the syntactic choices built into code use is an awareness of the interpretive strategies that codes users can anticipate. Within social groups marked by what Milroy referred to as dense networks, then, restricted code accentuates feelings of community and commonality. Within educational settings, on the other hand, this code creates limitations on meaning. Another look at the features of restricted code will illustrate some of the potential drawbacks of its use in settings outside those communities where it originates. Points for reference, for example, can appear to be somewhat impersonal, and thus uncertain with respect to context and socially situated references. A preference for personal pronouns like you and they over first-person pronouns can make these references either seem overly general or just lacking in clarity as they suggest a preference for common experience over unique or discrete experience. (I think about a male colleague who found himself wondering about his position within the audience of a text whose author wrote, “You know what it’s like when you’re pregnant.”) This code also uses qualifiers less frequently than would elaborated code, and the preference of active voice, while it would seem

104 

J. S. SCHMIT

positive, might also decrease a capacity for describing conditions and other actions framed by modal verbs. Speakers of restricted code tend to focus on manner of communication rather than content: the how rather than the what. According to Bernstein, parts of conversation are “strung together like beads” rather than being arranged in logical sequence (1964, p. 62). There is a greater frequency of disjuncture and discontinuities in time, along with gaps in the discourse that speakers assume can be filled in by those who have shared experiences with the topics at hand. The content of speech gives preference to the concrete over the abstract, the narrative and descriptive over the analytical. Bernstein describes the speech within this code as “fast, fluent, with reduced articulatory cues, [while] meanings might be discontinuous, dislocated, condensed and local” (p. 62). A reader might thus ponder a tradeoff between the inclusive and familiar features of restricted code and the more nuanced descriptions possible within elaborated code. At the same time, the initial resistance to Bernstein’s work on codes may have grown out of a resistance of judgments based on social class membership. This is, unfortunately, part of what code use means: it can be taken to identify a form of social status rather than simple membership within a discourse community. Part of this resistance to Basil Bernstein’s conception of linguistic codes was motivated by his use of the terms ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ and the respective alignment of these codes with working-class communities and middle-class communities. Out of this alignment grew a perception that middle-class speech was better, especially in educational settings, because it included more detail and thus enabled a greater capacity for the construction of meanings. Given such a characterization, it was hard to imagine that the terms ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ wouldn’t imply powerful social judgments. At the same time, though, sociolinguistic theory has described a variety of corollary concepts that have gained credence and currency over the past three decades or so. The idea that languages exist to serve the very specific cultural needs of the people who use them can be traced back at least as far as Edward Sapir’s book Language (1921). Further, these descriptions of linguistic behavior within social groups grown out of a genuinely descriptive exercise. For this reason, we should not let labels get in the way of useful generalizations about language use.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

105

Recognizing Code Use in First-Year Student Writing The remainder of this chapter focuses on discourse practice among less-­ practiced writers in composition courses. One of the distinguishing features of writing by developmental students, especially those just entering the academy, is their tendency to use restricted code. Bernstein’s concept, offers a better cognitive schema for imagining writing interventions than do concepts like voice, register, or linguistic variety. According to Littlejohn (2002), codes focus on the organizing principles of communication used by social groups. These groups may use grammatical rules consistent with those of the dominant culture, but they select and organize information in predictable ways because they rely on assumptions about shared knowledge and language practice. Shared Assumptions These assumptions have a direct impact on the pragmatics of both codes. For restricted-code speakers, context is more widely shared than it is among elaborated code speakers. In the passage from Niko’s essay above we find examples of unfamiliar social behaviors being related to a familiar audience. When he writes, “That’s how people greet in Europe,” he reveals several assumptions: first, his audience is unfamiliar with such practices, presumably because they have not traveled to Europe; second, the practice of men kissing each other on the cheeks is strange, even unacceptable or unimaginable to his intended audience; and third, he needs to explain his entry into this foreign practice in a way that his audience can accept: “and here I am kissing a dude’s cheek as scruffy as I am.” Among a more socially or culturally diverse group, Niko passage above might imagine a different reaction to what he describes, but he assumes a probable response based on his own cultural presuppositions: kissing among men, even on the cheek, is outside the American definition of masculinity and is thus to be related in guarded terms. Social Expectations  Within discourse communities, expectations play an important role on a variety of levels. Specifically, interpretive strategies depend on what we know about other speakers in the community. Social and cultural frames of discourse entail meaning of themselves, as in the case of storytelling. They also build on sets of cultural concepts, like church-­appropriate behavior (in Timmy’s essay), masculinity (in Niko’s essay), or workplace conduct (in Zach’s essay). These expectations can be shared or they can be exclusive, depending on the community. If we fail to

106 

J. S. SCHMIT

take these expectations into account, we can fail to get our meanings across. If we get them right, we can craft meanings with particular success. Cultural Presuppositions The ways in which we relate to the world around us are frequently shaped by prevailing ideologies, which we mainly internalize without conscious awareness. The result can be a belief that the world actually is as we imagine it, and this belief is frequently reinforced by our recognition of common ground among those with whom we interact. Thus, asking the question, “You don’t eat pork?” entails a presupposition that eating pork is the social norm. Predictability of Syntactic Forms  While this feature is one of Bernstein’s key indicators of his “restricted code,” it is true only on the clausal level. Sentences within restricted code appear, in fact, to include a wide range of multi-clausal constructions, and these evidence a high frequency of subordination. This pattern of modification through subordination might be made necessary by the use of low-­referential nouns. Still, one form of syntactic predictability found within these highly subordinated sentences is the infrequency of subordinate clauses that precede the independent or main clauses they modify. While the rules of syntax typically allow independent clauses and subordinate clauses to be freely transposed, such transpositions are seldom found in restricted-code. These suppositions, based on our awareness of shared cultural experiences, lie at the foundation of codes: the way that we chose to construct messages in order to maximize their utility and our efficiency in communicating them. If we actually said everything that we needed to say in order for a message to be understood by a complete stranger—or maybe better, someone from another planet—our conversations would be ponderous and interminable. But we know what we don’t have to say all that. In fact, over time partners and spouses begin to assume that everything they say to each other will be intelligible, no matter how great the paucity of distinct nouns or other points of reference. The greater the degree of shared experience, the less we need to say in order to be understood. In fact, this form of conversational practice—not saying more than one has to—is strongly supported by social convention. These conventions dictate that we follow certain maxims of conversation, like those defined by Paul Grice, (1975), and by doing so we keep conversational turns shorter and more economical. For example, the topics that we discuss are typically not new to their participants in any conversation. They are familiar, and so

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

107

the participants can rely heavily on their prior knowledge. Once on topic, conversational partners are free to use multiple pronouns (linguists and computer programmers call this anaphora) and more general nouns like things, or stuff, since the objects of the conversation are quite familiar, and even without specification of topics they can follow along almost effortlessly because they share background and experiences with each other. Elaborated Code and Its Uses • Frequent communication across community lines • Peer-to-peer feedback on writing • Reducing reliance on shared knowledge • New community connections • New identity construction • Individualized • Universal • Flexible • Complex (in role sets) • Varied in perspective • Built on weak ties In larger and more diverse social contexts, the ability of speakers to rely on shared assumptions becomes greatly reduced. In the absence of common cultural background, for example, speakers cannot rely and shared understanding among a community’s members. As a result, the advantages of restricted-code are not available to them. Verbal shortcuts contrast with extensive foregrounding. Syntactic organization is more likely to be more elaborate, losing the elegance of restricted-code speech. Many more assumptions need to be framed as explicit propositions. Social expectations are more broad and less specific, thus requiring speakers to articulate their understanding of social context more plainly so as to minimize ambiguity. And in the absence of cultural presupposition, speakers need to explain the conditions of meaning more explicitly. Viewed in this way, elaborated code encompasses a more burdensome set of practices than does restricted code. Foregrounding  While smaller communities might share a sense of what is important, what is prominent, and what is common, larger communities require the explicit establishment of a discourse context. Scene setting, both figurative and literal, is more necessary in larger and more diverse communities. Qualification, specification, and modification become

108 

J. S. SCHMIT

c­ rucial to acceptance and interpretation of messages among speakers from diverse backgrounds. In short, messages constructed for diverse communities require more detail, more entailment, and much more explicit setting of context. Elaborated-code speakers tend to be oriented to more frequent use of such practices. Syntactic Variety As the need increases to articulate diverse meanings through discourse, syntactic strategies become more diverse. This is especially true in written discourse, within which syntax can be consciously manipulated. Thus, a broad syntactic repertoire is more than just a source of aesthetic pleasure; it is a necessity of the meaning making process. As an expectation of elaborated code, then, syntactic variety becomes an expectation. Explicit Framing Discourse framing takes place everywhere, but its explicit use appears to be most evident when issues of choice emerge. If we think of framing as the social construction of social phenomena, we can see how it finds application in elaborated code. Issues of choice are likely to be more frequent where social phenomena are more disparate and more numerous. There is evidence that social frames are used to promote social solidarity, which might not arise as frequently or naturally within discourse among speakers from diverse cultural and social backgrounds. While it is hardly the case that R-code communities are fully homogenous, they frequently have fewer arenas of social context that includes greater multiplicity. Formal Articulation  Within professional and social settings that define crucial cultural concepts—the law, religion, academic study, medicine, the arts, and politics, to name a few—a clear formulation of ideas is essential, and elaborated-­code continually evolves to meet this set of needs. While the continuum of social change ranges broadly from static to dynamic, restricted code is more likely to align with more static social settings (else reliance on shared background and assumptions will be subverted) while elaborated code is more likely to serve in more dynamic settings. Conditional Meanings  Among the possibilities of elaborated code is the ability to cast language in a variety of conditions. While the subjunctive mood is all but extinct in English, elaborated-code is more likely to evidence the use of modal auxiliary verbs, tenses, and aspects to promote possibilities for representing conditions and unreality in discourse.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

109

The code provides a verbal shorthand that creates efficiencies (less detail and less speech overall) and privileges social connection. This latter effect produces a resistance to leaving local codes behind as their speakers enter school settings. Restricted code, in other words, reinforces social relationships and thus become preferred over standard usage (Labov, 1969). By contrast, elaborated code uses maximal detail, spelling out ideas rather than relying on common associations with a subject at hand. Its advantage lies in its ability to make topics availability to a far broader audience. The resistance to using elaborated code reflects is disjunction from the social identities of non-middle-class speakers. Of themselves, codes are reminders of social identity—a target of education, and of higher education especially, that we do not like to admit. The question at hand, then, regards appropriate interventions for writers who limit their language to restricted code.

Codes and Controversy In recent years, Bernstein’s work has been interpreted as putting forward a deficit view of language attainment based on social-class distinctions. Class consciousness, no matter how it is presented, is typically seen as divisive, especially when value is attached to class-specific behavior. To some degree, the privileging of linguistic forms is inherent in any system that enforces Standard grammatical forms. There is evidence that Bernstein did not want restricted code to be viewed as an indicator of deficit. In describing users of restricted code, he says this: The point I want to make is that restricted code is available to all members of society as the social conditions that generate it are universal. But it may be that a considerable section of our society has access only to this code by virtue of the implications of class background. (p. 62)

While restricted code is, technically, available to anyone, it is quite unlikely that it will be chosen by members outside the communities in which it is used. Bernstein skirts the issue of membership in making this statement, so while it is possible for speakers outside or a social class or a speech community to adopt the patterns of a speech code, it is quite unlikely that they would, for two primary reasons. First, the adoption of restricted code is not possible unless speakers participate in its use. While it is possible that

110 

J. S. SCHMIT

they could mimic its features—just as white middle-class youth might mimic some features of African-American English as they attempt to impersonate hip hop and rap musicians—they would lack the shared cultural knowledge that makes codes possible in the first place. Second, social class identity is reinforced by social positioning. Speakers who are socially and culturally situated will share class-based features that are encoded in their communities and reflected in their identities. It is far more likely that the features of elaborated code will be adopted by restricted code speakers as they face pressures to inhabit a different identity within educational settings. Bernstein continues: I am suggesting that there is a relatively high probability of finding children limited to this code among sections of the lower working-class population. On this argument, the general form of their speech is not substandard English but is related to and shares a similar origin of the restricted code I have just outlined. It is a special case—a case where children can use one and only one speech system. What this code makes relevant to them, the learning generated by apparently spontaneous acts of speech, is not appropriate for their formal educational experience. But only from this point of view is it inappropriate (p. 62).

Anyone in the US who teaches in a manner or curriculum that enforces the use of Standard English—and this would be the vast majority of us—is equally guilty of perpetuating a deficit image of local codes, no matter how we attempt to talk our way around it. When we teach writing, however, we have a strong and defensible position for acknowledging a deficit, but here we must be clear. It is not a deficit of intelligence or character or heritage or social status, but a deficit in ability to construct meaning for a wide variety of audiences. The important question, though, is not whether Bernstein imposes deficit judgments on working class speakers, but whether or not he captures generalizations about discourse practices within speech communities. These communities frequently are characterized by what Leslie Milgram call “dense networks”: communities whose members have multiple sites of interaction with each other: school, work, residence, church, and other social points of contact. The greater the density of the network, the Milgram posits, the greater the degree of social commonality. This commonality serves as background for discourse within such communities, in turn creating a set of normative discourse patterns.

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

111

By contrast with the dense networks studied by Milgram, Mark Granovetter (1973) described the advantages offered by what he referred to as “weak ties”: more casual and more frequent points of contact found in more loosely allied networks. These would entail social networks that are more one dimensional. Unlike communities in which social connections overlap (people work, worship, study, recreate, and socialize with the same social groups), weak ties abound in communities where these activities involve differing groups of people. Here, it is more likely to be the case that word meanings will remain consistent across discourse groups. As Milroy suggest in her descriptions of social networks, social commonality serves as background for discourses within speech communities, in turn creating a set of normative discourse patterns. This term “semantic variation” was adopted by Ruqaiya Hassan to describe what she discovered in her research into word-choice decisions across social class settings. Because such settings constitute the contexts for socialization, Hassan posited that differences in meaning had some connection to differences in social context, and that these differing contexts gave rise to differing patterns of social practice among language users from differing social classes. Hassan, who studied with Bernstein before launching her own distinguished career, did extensive work on community-­ based semantic variation, noting the differences in meaning that emerge across community boundaries and social class lines. Conducting research over a ten-year period in Sydney, Hasan (2009) examined the intersections for everyday language and children’s perceptions concerning social context. She described her findings in terms of “semantic variation,” or differences in meanings among the uses of the same word. At the heart of this research was the finding that children heard differing meanings from parents and teachers. While parents used meanings commonly found in class-based speech patterns, the teachers’ use of meanings that aligned with middle-class discourse created inequities in the education of these children. In describing the impact of this patterning, Lemke (2011) says that Hasan’s work establishes two important results. First, it established significant differences in the ways mothers from working class backgrounds used frames when compared with mothers from middle-class backgrounds. These differences included frames for questions and answers, commands and requests, and explanations of reasons offered in normal conversational settings. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this work established that teachers’ interactions with students closely followed typical patterns of meaning that grow out of middle-class

112 

J. S. SCHMIT

discourses. According to Lemke, “linguistically and sociologically, Hasan argues from her data, variation in meaning making must be considered an integral if not the primary factor in our understanding of the role of language in the constitution of social structure.” This mismatch is relevant today for students beginning higher education today, although this latter group often arrives with different expectations. At Augsburg, on the other hand, faculty have quickly learned that we cannot recruit a new and more diverse population of students without significantly shifting our teaching methods. Expansion of student discourses may remain our goal, but holding old assumptions about orientation to academic discourse and what they entail can prove a painful trap for those students whose orientation to higher education is not deliberate and purposeful. The crucial difference in Lemke’s reappraisal of Bernstein’s hypothesis focuses on these differences in meaning making that occur across social class positions. The differences between school and home, the child’s two primary settings for socialization, tend to feed into perceptions of difference and hierarchy in contemporary societies. Thus, these differences support beliefs that linguistic differences can instantiate feelings of distance among students who experience this home-school mismatch. Scholars who have reviewed Bernstein’s commentary of linguistic codes have argued that his work needs to be viewed in the context of the socio-­ political climate within which his ideas were initially developed. Bolander and Wells (2009), for example, argue that much of Bernstein’s work has been misinterpreted. The labels he used to name the codes he studied may be partly at fault, as might his attention to correlations between social class and academic readiness. It may well be that the connections between social and cultural background and performance in school are meaningful, even though they difficult to advance in a political climate that is unfriendly to such distinctions. To the extent that codes are culturally situated, theories of codes will have differing points of focus. One essential similarity, though, involves the need for codes to be consistently and accurately decodable. One might assert that codes, like languages, can be acquired implicitly or learned explicitly. These processes of acquisition depend on the setting within which a code is used and on the cognitive formation of those constructs that comprise the code. When codes serve social and cultural functions, speakers (and writers) would acquire these codes at an early age. In new social and cultural settings—those not part of a child’s early

6  CODES IN COMPOSITION: CROSSING COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES 

113

experience—speakers would need to acquire additional codes. Academic codes would be an example of this latter type of socially situated language convention sets. Most importantly here, proficiency in new cultural codes like those used in the academy would define success in the projection of what some call an “academic voice.” Applications in the Teaching of Writing The location and mission of Augsburg University in Minneapolis place a natural focus on issues of code use. Augsburg’s student population includes 50% students of color (this number nearly doubles among developmental writers)—of whom many use Standard grammar but come from tightly knit cultural communities—as well as a large number of white first-­ generation students who come from working class and rural backgrounds. As a college of the city, Augsburg aspires to help students acquire the communication skills to work across community boundaries, whether they are Somali, Hmong, African-American, or rural Minnesotan. One entry point for use of elaborated code is found in educational settings, especially those that include a mixture of code speakers. Within our developmental writing courses, instructors work with students to develop elaborated code skills by first creating new local codes among diverse groups of students within the college community. One frequently used genre for such writing is concept definition, which tends to focus on shared semantic properties rather than semantic variation. Point of view can be either first- or third-person, and the best subjects are community-­ based issues. This focus on content formation in writing adapts to what Tuman (1988) describes as a larger theory of the sociology of knowledge. As Augsburg University has become more ethnically diverse, opportunities for cross-cultural conversations have increased markedly, and this difference provides a natural venue for peer revision conferences in writing courses. Students discover fairly quickly that they cannot rely on shared cultural associations and socially normative discourse patterns when they write. A likely result is they begin to leave behind the code markers they arrived with from home. My guess is that this shift, which one might describe as an intuition of more elaborated code behaviors, does not occur consciously but rather naturally as a reflection of their desire to fit it. If we successfully gauge the degree of our shared experiences, we signal that we are close to our audience because we understand who they are and what they know. This practice lies at the heart of conversations within

114 

J. S. SCHMIT

“high-involvement cultures,” where overlapping signals a listener’s capacity to track with a speaker, even finishing her sentences for her. Likewise, when we anticipate what they already know and give them credit of it, we show that we are aware of their background (and possible that we share it). The better we reflect their understanding, the more successfully we negotiate closeness with them.

References Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes and control (Vol. 3, 2nd ed.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences. American Anthropologist, 66(6 Part 2), 55–69. Bolander, B., & Watts, R. (2009). Rereading and rehabilitating Basil Bernstein. Multilingua, 28(2/3), 143–173. Chandler, D. (2001). Semiotics for Beginners. University of Wales Granovetter, M.  S. (1973). The strength of weak ties (PDF). The American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3). Academic. Hasan, R. (2009). In J. Webster (Ed.), Semantic variation: Meaning in society and sociolinguistics. Equinox. Volume Two in the Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. Labov, W. (1969). The logic of nonstandard English. Georgetown University Press. Lemke, J. L. (2011). Review of semantic variation: Meaning in society and sociolinguistics. Linguistics and the human sciences (pp. 1–7). Equinox. Littlejohn, S. (2002). Theories of human communication. Wadsworth. Milroy, L. (1987). Language and social networks. Blackwell. Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. Harcourt, Brace. Tuman, M. (1988). Class, codes, and composition: Basil Bernstein and the critique of pedagogy. College Composition and Communication, 39(1), 42–51. Whorf, B. L. (1940). Language, Thought, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 7

Schemas, Frames, and the Shapes of Meaning

There is a well-established belief that every human mind is a closed system. That is to say that each human brain operates independently, acquiring memories, processing experience, generating new ideas, and creating the associations that we call “meaning.” The only way things get out of this closed system is through some form of representation, which most frequently takes the form of language. We are able to create messages that convey the content held in our brains because we share languages with other human beings, who likewise can share with us what is happening in their brains. And while languages are constructed of shared elements— words, sentence-structure rules, and common understandings of meaning—at the same time they provide access to the structures that exist in individual minds.

Erving Goffman on Frames Goffman says that our original frames of interpretation inform later interpretations. He called these “primary frameworks” (1974, p. 21). He further identifies “natural” frameworks (contrasting with social frameworks) as physical. Social frameworks, according to Goffman, provide background for understanding. As such, these frames are an “operating fiction,” ones within which “acts of daily living are understandable because of some primary framework (or frameworks) that informs them” (p.  26). In other words, these frames provide contextual background, mental maps that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_7

115

116 

J. S. SCHMIT

organize social experience according to the conventions to which we have been socialized or acculturated. Understanding the frameworks of a cultural group—knowing its belief system, or its “cosmology”—provides “a central concept in frame analysis: the key” (Goffman, 1974, pp. 43–44). This “key” provides an intentional metaphor to musical patterning. Our interpretations, in turn, follow from the conventions of the framework, our knowledge of the ways in which it operates. Our recognition of the social elements of these frames connects us with social experience: “the set of conventions by which a given activity, one already meaningful in terms of some primary framework” (p. 46). This recognition sets us up to create interpretations by setting up a question, “What is it that is going on here” (p. 46). Participants will answer this question in ways that push their interpretation as far as it can reasonably go: into what Goffman thought of as a “realm.” Meaning can thus be understood by placing frames around our experiences: by using sets of available patterns to provide contexts for daily experiences. This idea is consistent with our understanding of the ways in which our brains organize experience. Identity and the Shapes of Memory From the earliest stages of brain development, we form neural networks that give us the building blocks of meaning. These connections that our minds create provide our bases for understanding virtually everything we do, think, and believe. We know that among the things our brains do best is the creation of categories, and these categories organize our experiences in ways that are “meaningful.” In everyday life, we visit these centers of meaning constantly. On one hand, neural connections control the ways in which we see the world. On another hand, they cause us at times to not see anything at all. This latter phenomenon is attributed to the lack of cognitive experience that might have previously been assigned meaning, activated a memory, or in some other way found an association. So, what does this have to do with a writer’s identity? Consider an example of an olfactory memory: maybe Marcel Proust’s famous memory of madeleines. Nobody much reads Remembrance of Things Past anymore—probably few people ever did—but anyone who has heard the story of his narrator’s experience with petites madeleines probably remembers the power that memory held over his narrator’s worldview. The power of this story about memory does not derive from Proust’s reputation as perhaps the greatest fiction writer of his day. It comes from the things he wrote about: the ways in which memory returns us to the

7  SCHEMAS, FRAMES, AND THE SHAPES OF MEANING 

117

pleasure of physical sensation; the awareness of a feeling so strong that it had to have come from deep in the soul, transported even from a previous life. Something about the flavor of tea mixed with the crumbs of this small cake created “an exquisite pleasure” that invaded his senses, compelling him to imagine why. We have all felt this potency of memory somewhere at some time, so strongly that it becomes part of who we are. Sensations of this kind seem to organize everything around them, imbuing meaning as they touch our consciousness: the comforting smell of a grandmother’s apartment; the soothing hum of an electric fan on a hot summer’s night; the flavor of a burnt marshmallow mixed with the tang of wood smoke. These associations become part of us. They explain why two readers of a work of fiction can experience it so differently. They find ways to connect us to Proust or not. The ways in which we create and activate these manners of thinking have a power that we seldom stop to realize. Choose your metaphor: they are filters that let some observations enter our minds and hold others at bay; they are road maps that show us how we got from one point to the next; they are molds that provide ready-made shapes for amorphous matter. This is work of schemas, and we need access to them in order to make sense of the world. If making such sense is the work of writers, then writers need the freedom to activate these schemas—their schemas—in order to bring order and meaning to experience. At some level we are these schemas, the collective accumulations of the things we know from experience. If we accept that this interpretation of experience is real and reflects us accurately, then the next logical step is to suggest that, in whatever ways we use language to organize these experiences, language and its organization are central to our identity. Here I mean a specific language: the language that a writer has carried and used and shaped since those early days of brain development. The languages of our childhood connect us to all the things they name: the cultural concepts of home and youth, the patterns of our social practices, and values and beliefs of our families and friends, to name just a few. These are our sources of meaning, and we need them in the forms that created them and defined us. Language is absolutely central to human identity. Any sociolinguist will echo this argument. The Nature of Cognitive Schemas Schemas are generalized conceptual structures, representations of various related data: events, actions, objects, contextual knowledge, and

118 

J. S. SCHMIT

relationships. They function as categories, and they provide us with mental shortcuts. They give us models for processing experience. They set up our expectations and suggest patterns for cognitive processing. Our use of prototypes, those examples that come to mind first among members of any category, provides the foundations for thinking about nearly everything we encounter in daily life—the stuff of Montaigne’s personal essays, for example. Schemas, then, play a large role in our creation and assignment of meaning. The idea that the brain uses available pathways whenever possible is not at all new. Piaget called this assimilation: a process by which we rely on existing structures of knowledge to make sense of new information. The more work we have to do in order to make sense of something, to create meaning for it, the less likely we are to complete that cognitive task successfully. If writers from diverse linguistic backgrounds need to rewrite their experiences in languages that are not their own, are they interrupting the work of schematic organization? To what extent do the specific features of language afford us the material for schemas? Too often we imagine exposition as a free play of ideas, or at least as a play of ideas detached for the moment from their human sources—the characters who speak the words that create those ideas. We might do better to imagine that ideas never float free. They never play fair. They never find the freedom from bias that we imagine them to. The rhetorician Min-­ Zhan Lu and others have written about the essential fallacy of meaning, an idea that stands in contrast to what so many writers claim. “I know what I want to say,” they claim. “I just can’t seem to say it.” It would be more accurate to say that until we say it, we don’t know what we want to say. Meaning takes shape in our expressions of it, but not before. It is only in the formations of language that abstract meaning comes into being. The nature of that language, then, is arguably a necessary cause of meaning, and different varieties of language can thus create differences in possibility for meaning. Linguistic diversity will yield diversity of meaning as well. As to the impact of language on meaning, we can speculate broadly about the relationship between language and intention. Dwight Bolinger said, “Language is not a neutral instrument; it is a thousand ways biased.” Meaning and argument are human endeavors, not linguistic or rhetorical endeavors. Behind every idea we place into exposition is a human cause, a human concern, and thus ultimately a human voice, no matter how well disguised by the conventions of a genre.

7  SCHEMAS, FRAMES, AND THE SHAPES OF MEANING 

119

And if this is so, if exposition is the art of explanation, we must ask, “explanation by whom? For what purpose? Toward what goal? Favoring whose ideology?” The disguises that we are taught to wear for the purpose of adhering to generic convention are important. If we don’t wear them, we might even be excluded from the conversation, just as if we had arrived at a costume party in street clothes. It’s simply a matter of social appropriateness. In the middle class, men wear ties to weddings, and women wear whatever clothing they choose—frequently dresses—to demonstrate that the occasion is important. One does not wear a tee shirt or athletic shoes unless to call attention to one’s self. Most of the time we are allowed to go out in public as ourselves, but even then there are still costumes. These may be the costumes of everyday life, whatever it is that we ear to fit into the setting that we are visiting, or they may be the costumes of particular occasions. So it is with the identities we bring to expository writing. We learn by observing what it is that we should wear, how it is that we should speak and comport ourselves, and why it is that we open our mouths in the first place. Roman Jakobson observed six distinct functions of language, but these functions overlap. These could be matched with expository discourse in some interesting ways. Schemata as Filters for Experience As we study the organizing principles of language that make communication possible, we find ourselves making reference to these patterns of language interaction. Cognitive schemata are reflective of the ways in which we organize information. For example, when we recognize patterns that suggest the presence of a category, we might start thinking of yet other examples, other members of that category. Psychologists like Eleanor Rosch have discovered, though, that not all members of a category are equally representative. Instead, it turns out that categories contain particular examples that can shape our image of the category as a whole. These examples are prototypes. Not only are they the first examples that tend to come to mind, but they can influence our perceptions of other, less-usual examples. While prototypes provide basic generalizations about our categories of experience, stereotypes can muddy our cognitive waters. These examples are widely understood to contain some validity, some truth, but also to be reductive or oversimplified. As cognitive schemata, stereotypes provide

120 

J. S. SCHMIT

frameworks that are often unreliable or that shade our perceptions in particular ways. If we think about schemata as lenses through which experiences are viewed, then stereotypes color our perceptions in ways that obscure their clarity. While we don’t want to foster the production or the use of stereotypes, we do want to think about the ways in which they manifest themselves. The most common form of stereotype that writers need to be aware of often goes under the heading of “conventional wisdom,” which, though common, is generally understood to be wrong, or at least lacking in accuracy. A third kind of schema, and perhaps the one that argues most strongly for the creation of unique written identities, is the personal construct. The theory that we are most familiar with is probably the one developed by George Kelly. Kelly’s work focused on the ways in which individual experience leads us to cognitive constructs: the mental structures that we use to process our perceptions of the world. For example, our beliefs, perceptions, desires, intentions, emotions, and sources of pain or pleasure, or disgust, or love. The theory of these constructs suggests that we use them to interpret the ways in which the world works, and in that sense they resemble ideological interpretations, which in turn influence our decision making. For writers, these personal constructs are key elements of identity. If we are what we believe, then these constructs inform our worldviews in important ways. A final example of schemata would involve the perception of scripts, which frame our perceptions of order or chronology in our experiences. When students think of written scripts in the context of composition, they would probably think the 5-paragraph essay, the form of which is rather tightly organized. I typically tell students that this form is a model, not a script. For less experienced writers who need to conceptualize an essay, the model is fine. Students quickly learn, though, that its limitations outweigh its benefits. A more sophisticated and specific model might be the Toulmin method, which consists of a claim, followed by a warrant, grounds, backing, qualifiers, and a rebuttal. In its application, these components of the method are not completely rigid, but they still work like a script. So, what does this have to do with written identity? The close use of a script can function in one of two general ways although we should probably imagine these as two poles of a spectrum: slavish adherence to a script can identify the writer as a novice, while more nuanced attention to a script can show the writer to have a more thorough awareness of writing conventions. It is worth noting that instructor

7  SCHEMAS, FRAMES, AND THE SHAPES OF MEANING 

121

evaluations of student writing can either favor the use of a script of regard the script as a form of crutch, so in the process of teaching written identity, instructors should be clear about the approach they favor. One could argue that at some point in this process of constructing meaning within texts, our awareness of another human mind becomes central; identities, selves, and stances all take shape in relation to other human beings. When we understand who those other humans are—what they believe, what they intend, what they value—we are better able to structure an imagined interaction. This brings us to theory of mind (ToM): the ability to ascribe intentional states to oneself and to others and to recognize that these intentional states differ from one person to another. Since so much of the conventional teaching of rhetoric revolves around articulating stances, perspectives, values, purposes, and desires, it seems necessary to account for these differences and to understand their origins. The process by which we discern these differences is nicely explained by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory. In order for readers to have a transaction with a text, they need to be able to imagine the cognitive processes that shape the text itself. Imagining a written identity would seem to be a part of this process.

Purposes and Values for Addressing Voice In order to focus appropriate attention on the manifestations of writers in academic texts, we should carefully assess the purposes toward which these projections of writers can be directed. Following an excellent taxonomy from Lillis (2013, pp. 160–161), we can begin by enumerating a variety of possible intentions that underlie the creation of a writerly persona. Each domain necessarily entails its own expectations. The Poetic-Aesthetic Frame  Within this sphere writers are seen as artists engaged in the craft of composition. Here, writing itself is an act of genius or individual talent. The implicit goals of writing in this domain include the achievement of beauty, individual expression, inspiration, and originality. The Transactional-Rationalist Frame  Here the writer attempts to carefully encode meanings within a written text for the purpose of achieving clarity, truth, and reason within a message.

122 

J. S. SCHMIT

The Process-Expressionist Frame Working through a series of drafts, the writer attempts to create a transparent representation of ideas, and so the emphasis of this domain falls on the work of the writer: the goals, activities, and tasks required to bring expression to fruition. This conception of the writer is common in composition studies. The Socio-cognitive Frame  Following from theories of Vygotsky (1939) and Leontiev (1981), activity theory views writing as a systematic and socially situated pursuit. Writing within this domain thus addresses a social goal or action, and writing genres often create expectations for communication within such systems. An important focus of this domain revolves around the ways in which communication is mediated by the use of tools such a writing technologies and language itself. It focuses on writing as part of an activity system. The Social-Semiotic Frame  Here attention falls upon the ways in which writers strive to create meaning in social contexts. The roles of the writer include both rhetor and designer: the positioning of a message for political or social purposes and shaping of the message for the needs of a specific audience (Kress, 2010). The Socio-discursive Domain  The influence of critical discourse analysis (CDA) calls our attention to the ways in which discourses manifest social positions and cultural contexts. By extension, discourses become sites invested with power, ideologies, and social beliefs. Mastery of these discourses provides access to power, and lack of access leads to inequality. One’s demonstration of prowess within the dominant discourses provides social and cultural enfranchisement. The Social Practice Frame  Aspects of this domain follow the patterns of everyday language use and derive meanings from an understanding of language as shared social conventions. Meanings are the products of language use, and they evolve according to the social practices of speakers and readers. They are based in both the production and consumption of language, the linguistic history that users carry in their memories, and the ways in which they are conditioned to use language as a set of social resources.

7  SCHEMAS, FRAMES, AND THE SHAPES OF MEANING 

123

The Participatory Culture Frame  As shared cultural artifacts, any language or discourse invites the participation of language users. Within this frame, we are all producers and consumers of the cultures within which we participate. Our cultural practices define our modes of language use and their aims. This overview hardly does justice to Lillis’ excellent and thorough overview of frames for language use, but it provides some sense for the ways in which language itself can be viewed within a set of well-established practices. These frames take the form of implicit knowledge among their participants, but that knowledge is no less powerful as a result of its invisibility. Recall what Fairclough claimed about ideological common sense operating most effectively when it is least visible. Beyond our everyday conceptions of language lie the manifestations of memory, ideology, cultural value, academic status, and social belonging. Even without an ability to theorize or categorize the operations of language, we are keenly aware of the ways in which it positions us, assigning advantage or disadvantage in differing circumstances.

More About Frames One more interpretive frame that we invoke is that of a conversation, maybe our most central communicative model. This frame comes to life physically in our everyday lives but organizes our communication by operating beneath the surface. Paul Grice has offered us a set of conversational maxims that guide our uses of language in everyday social interactions (pp.  26–27). These maxims are also largely the products of implicit knowledge, guiding the practices of speakers according to sets of social expectations. These various frames take shape as mental representations, which in turn guide or interpretations of language and its users. For example, we ascribe both meaning and intent to violations of Grice’s maxims. Changing topics can be an innocent attempt to connect personal experiences within an ongoing conversation, or they may be read as the boredom on the part of a listener, lack of interest in the conversation at hand, simple rudeness, or even excessive excitement on the part of a participant who can’t wait for a simple change of turn. In other words, both the observance and the rejection of these organizing principles are thus meaningful. When we read written language we imagine someone speaking those words, perhaps because we learn language aurally before we learn to read.

124 

J. S. SCHMIT

We might say that writing creates a fiction within which language is actually taking place. For this reason it is understandable that language is interpreted according to social conventions, even when there is no social interaction taking place. Kinesthetic Image Schemas Here we might look at some of the ways in which people frame purpose to establish the grounds for understanding to invoking frameworks. Image schemas seem to derive from natural, physical frameworks, while the scenarios into which we place these schemas are guided by social frameworks. Goffman points out that all social frameworks are guided by rules (1974, p. 24). To some extent, the physical (acoustic) features of written identity, or voice, have to be signaled through features of the text. Writers can create these signals by providing a number of cues: textual features like boldface, italics, and underlining; syntactic cues like topicalization (moving a key word out of a normal sentence structure to the front) and passive voice as ways of focusing our attention on a particular noun topic; word choice); and semantic cues that invoke a reader’s prior knowledge or experience. Charles Fillmore conceptualized a set of semantic frames that ascribe meaning based on what we know about the meaning of words. One well-­ known example would involve the meaning of the word sell, which can only be understood within a frame of commerce, which entails concepts like buying, selling, pricing, value, finance, exchange, etc. What we know can thus be categorized within specific frames, and this knowledge can be conveyed as forms of semantic information. Unusual choices of words and sentence structures can be associated with an imagined written identity. John McPhee included a brilliant example of the power of a single word in his New Yorker essay from March 15, 2015, entitled “Frame of Reference.” This word, by the way, allows us to consider in advance the ideas of David Fillmore, who introduced us all to the idea that certain words live within their own contextual frames, but more about that later. Here is a piece of McPhee’s commentary on a one student’s profile of another student at Princeton. In the profile, Abe Crystal mentioned, without amplification, that Grainger David had “sprezzatura.” Sprezzatura? Of course, in this advanced age of

7  SCHEMAS, FRAMES, AND THE SHAPES OF MEANING 

125

the handheld vocabulary, everyone on earth knows what sprezzatura means, but in 2000 I had no idea, and I reached for an Italian dictionary.

McPhee goes on to illustrate the struggle to find a definition before commenting on the nature of frames of reference. Each contextual frame in his essay invokes a bit of experience, a tone, a feeling or mood, that writers can cause us to undergo as we compare the known with the unknown. Conclusions Regarding Cognitive Organization and Identity Within the examples above, I have attempted to restrict my focus to some of the best-known examples of framing, schemata, and other patterns of meaning. Just a few points will summarize the significance of these theories. First, these patterns largely take the form of implicit knowledge: things we know without knowing that we know them. They function, though, to pattern and organize our thoughts about people and the language they use. Second, these patterns reveal the collective experiences of people who use them, whether as readers of writers. For writers, they signal an awareness not only of the conventions they represent but of the relative positioning of a writer within a given communicative act. To this extent they represent thematic roles. And finally, such patterns can reveal strategic goals in communication. For example, the presentation of potentially controversial or unpopular arguments might suggest that the writer withhold an argument until the very last moment, buffering the writer’s position before revealing it. As a marker of identity, this strategy positions the writer as thoughtful, sensitive to popular sentiment, and politically aware. All of these considerations involve an interaction of communicative goals and intentional patterning.

References Fillmore, C. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. In Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Conference on the Origin and Development of Language and Speech, 280, 20–32. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press. Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press. Kress, G (2010). Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication.

126 

J. S. SCHMIT

Leontiev, A. A. (1981). Psychology and the Language Learning Process. Oxford: Pergamon Lillis, T. (2013). The Sociolinguistics of Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Vygotsky, L. (1939). ‘Thought and Speech.’ Psychiatry, 2, 29–54. New York.

CHAPTER 8

Helping Writers Get Results

This chapter moves us from the “what” and the “why” to the “how,” offering teachers of writing not only new ways to think about written identity but also new ways to elicit it. Rather than focusing on linguistic features, though, this chapter offers suggestions for stance building, positioning with respect to subjects: social and cultural self-representation, as well as indicators of closeness to and distance from the audiences of these texts. It also examines the bases of social distinction and relationship to social institutions as it offers advice for replicating styles that elicit approval. To begin, a quick and effective way to reframe this conversation about written identity is to establish roles for writers as they undertake the tasks of creating original pieces of discourse. Thinking in terms of roles or personae or voices or identity (we should all choose the terms and labels that best fit what we ask students to do in our classrooms), we can start with this small set of writers’ positions that suit the structures of writing instruction. For example, I always begin first-year writing courses with a personal narrative. Story telling is a crucial method of cultural transmission. It allows us all to tell of those key beliefs, experiences, characters, places and times, and motivations that set us all into action. We all assume the role of narrator on some occasions in our lives, though many of us struggle to enact this role skillfully. As some point too we all inhabit the role of teacher or witness or participant in the world that we see and articulate. For this purpose, I like to assign profile writing, in part because it puts us directly in touch with the history and the practice of those activities that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4_8

127

128 

J. S. SCHMIT

we would like to describe for an audience. Next is the role of the explorer. While we tend to think of this identity in terms of maps, we quickly realize that everywhere our minds move is a venue for exploration. This aim shaped the original purpose of the essay, the attempt to clarify ideas and answers that need to be consciously framed. And finally, for the purposes of this present discussion, I would add the role of researcher. This will become a constant activity for the learned, though its techniques and settings will constantly expand. Finally, before moving on to direct consideration of these roles, a word on the personal: it is an has long been the object of education to allow (perhaps even require) students to locate themselves in a world of ideas. There is no greater purpose in the world of education. I continue to be stunned by the words of David Coleman, ninth president of the College Board, who famously said, as this volume has already recounted that young people will find out upon entering the world that “nobody really gives a shit what you think.” Perhaps in is fitting that Wikipedia describes him first as a businessman, since it seems as stretch to call him an educator. In my four decades as a college instructor and professor, I have firmly believed that what you (any writer) think is the only thing that matters. I used to tell students, upon what for most of them was their first reading of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” that they had just joined a group of people who possibly numbered in the millions. “So what?” I would ask them. The fact of having read this text essentially meant little; it was the act of interpreting this text that mattered, and every interpretation is the product of a human mind at work. That is what matters. That is what I will use to offer a grade. That is what makes each human mind remarkable: its capacity to create meaning. One of my own essays that have saved now for nearly fifty years is the term paper I wrote for my first-year English course. The assignment as to read and research a major world novel. I chose Crime and Punishment. My essay was thorough in its synthesis of the literary criticism that had been devoted to the text at that time, and my professor told me so. Below the grade, a B+, written of the first page was a note asking me what I thought about the novel. The point could not have been more clear. The object of this assignment was not to recount what had been said but rather to say it myself. That was how my professors would judge my work.

8  HELPING WRITERS GET RESULTS 

129

Storytelling: Models for the Construction of Narratives In my class I use the three-act narrative arc as the organizational frame for each student’s story. I do this for a number of reasons. First, it allows us to create a common vocabulary for describing a story and its pacing. Second, it unveils a set of generic expectations that audiences will share and use as the basis for their judgment. Third and most importantly, though, it makes implicit knowledge explicit. My students have all seemingly seen hundreds of episodes of television programs and feature films. They know and expect stories to unfold in a particular way. While there are, of course, many different models available to them, this one matches a set of expectations they have long ago internalized. Once this model is made explicit, we can move to the role of the storyteller, or narrator. Because this assignment involves a first-person participant narrator, we focus on the role of the storyteller as a character. While the shape and pacing of the story itself are counted as the prime criteria for judging this narrative, the written identity that each writer constructs is central to an effective telling of the story. Here is a sample of the first-person account that Jaelyn constructed as a way of constructing her character within this story. We can notice right away that she tells this story from the point of view of a child enveloped in a childish game. We are soon aware later in the story that this narrative account is essential to the feeling that the story constructs. As per usual, I was avoiding each crack in the sidewalk, expecting that one day my mother would thank me for saving her back. Step by step, I fixated on stepping between the lines of the brick sidewalk. With my pink flip-flops contrasting the ground, I soon lost track of the sound of my parents conversing. As I continued on, I noticed a silence. I lifted my head up from my stare on the ground to turn behind me and no longer see my family. I couldn’t hear the click of my mother’s brown sandals hitting the ground and my dad’s deep voice filling the air. Confused, I looked around to see myself caught in the maze of identical buildings.

Knowing that our narrator is a small child on vacation from snowy Wisconsin to the brilliant warm sun of Cancun, we can quickly visualize her, lost in the fascination of a childhood game she often played with her brother. The panic of a lost child dominates our imagination as we become

130 

J. S. SCHMIT

immersed in this story. Jaelyn’s ability to act the role—an adult narrator of a childhood story—is what ultimately makes the story come to life for us. This single paragraph, especially though its descriptive details, creates a clear narrative stance. Among the questions that all the students in the class had been offered were these: As writers working to create a written identity, you might want to think about who you are and what you do when you tell of a story. Here are some questions about narrators to help you. • Where do you come from, and where does your story come from? • How is your story a product of the place where it happened? • How is your voice a product or a reflection of that place? • What do stories sound like where you come from? • How do you want this story to sound? • What makes you a credible storyteller? • What causes you to shape the story in a particular way? • Who are the characters in your story, and how can you show your audience where they come from? Jaelyn’s story eventually answers all of these questions, but what brings the story to life is her careful construction of herself as the teller of this story. She gets into the role, and she shows us who she is. Her identity comes through the story in her manner of telling it.

Inventing Personae for Profiles The role of the profile writer can take many forms, but the examples we use for studying this genre all involved similar participant narrators to those used in their personal narratives. We believe these writers because we see them within the activities of the profiles they construct. Read, for example, this profile of Shakrain as presented to us by Saad: That was an odd dream. It felt so real. I wish I could actually fly like that over the bustling cities and lush green countryside! I woke up tired. I don’t usually remember my dreams, unless I wake up midway through. I grabbed my phone to check the time. It’s just past 9:00 am on a Friday morning. Friday is the weekend in Bangladesh. I noticed my younger brother Murad and his buddy Tanjim running around the room and talking. “Why are you two disturbing my peace here?” I asked in an irritated voice.

8  HELPING WRITERS GET RESULTS 

131

“Mama! Today is Shakrain! Come help us,” Tanjim called to me with excitement. ‘Mama’ means uncle in Bengali. Tanjim is my mother’s distant cousin… Shakrain, also known as Ghuri Utshob or the Kite Festival is one of the oldest Annual Celebrations in Dhaka. Its history can be traced back to almost 300 years, back when the region was ruled by the Mughal Empire. Shakrain is an important part of the Dhakaite culture. It occurs at the end of Poush, the ninth month of the Bengali calendar, midway through January. The setting of this festival changed drastically over the years. Once upon a time people used to fly kites on the vast open fields. Now Dhaka is one of the most congested places in the world, leaving us little to no open places. However, that didn’t stop anyone. Instead of fields people celebrate the day on their rooftops now.

We can note several aspects of identity construction in this profile. First, the opening lines of the essay bring us inside our narrator’s consciousness. Then he reveals the subject of his profile, a kite-flying festival. And finally, he translates for us the various details of this festival: its setting, its history, its activities, and its participants. Saad moves deftly through his responsibilities as the owner and writer of this profile. Quickly he becomes our guide and our translator. One could argue that it is the strength of his identity that brings this profile to life. In the process of inventing these profiles, all of these writers were asked to answer eight sets of questions, each listed below: • Your Involvement with the Subject –– Your interest in this topic –– Your experience with it –– Your perspective on it • The Subject Itself –– Its history or background –– Its typical setting(s) –– Descriptive details –– Misconceptions that need to be corrected –– The people who are involved in it

132 

J. S. SCHMIT

After addressing each question set, it was up to the writers to determine the arrangement of the piece as a whole. Invariably, this writing activity brings out important aspects of the writer’s identity because there is a need to create coherence in this profile, and it is the writer’s experience, interest, and perspective on the topic that create the “dominant impression” that the essay needs to provide for the sake of the readers’ experience.

The Role of Explorer in the Model of Montaigne The history of the essay is long and varied, but we do know some things about its origins. Conceived as a means for thinking through practical considerations and the bases for exploring them, Michel de Montaigne began writing in a new literary form, the essay. These short works were not intended to be complete considerations of their subjects, but rather they focused on familiar aspects of human life. Most importantly, though, these works were deliberately based in Montaigne’s personal perspective. They are also not presented in any systematic way, but rather reflect the philosophical viewpoints of their author. In the interest of preserving a focus on inquiry, writers of these essays today are generally advised to pursue a question, at least implicitly, and that question is typically directed to forms of practical application. In the model of Montaigne himself, they frequently take up philosophical considerations: What does it mean that people chasing different pursuits end up in the same place? What are the causes of sadness and sorrow? Why do we fixate on false causes? What do we make of idleness? Of liars? Of cowardice? Of obstinance? For Montaigne, these topics were not necessarily framed as questions, but one can recognize questions as the bases of these philosophical considerations. The main point, though, is that these explorations are presented as extensions of the personal. As students create the personae they will use to conduct exploratory essays in my classes, they are encouraged to start with a question, and then to examine the nature of this question. Here are some of the questions they can address themselves: • What is it about this question that ensures it will be open ended? • Right off the bat, how many possible answers can you imagine for this question? • Are there other possibilities for crafting this question? In what ways might this topic be paraphrased?

8  HELPING WRITERS GET RESULTS 

133

• What would each of these answers suggest about the person offering it? What perspective would each of these answers suggest about the person giving the answer? • Is there practical advice offered in each/any of these answers? What could a person do with each of these answers? Consider the following procedural questions as part of your inquiry. • What is it that I want to learn or consider further? • Why do I want to find an answer to this question? • How will I find the information I am looking for or discover what I need? • Who would have an interesting perspective on this question, and what should I ask them in order to find an answer? • Where can I go to get information and background on this topic? Next, consider your answers to these questions: • What am I confident that I know about this topic? • What am a sure that I don’t know but will need to know? • This may well be the key question that using this model might reveal for you: What is it that I don’t know that I know about this topic? What implicit knowledge to I have? • Are there things about this topic that I don’t know I don’t know? (These questions have not yet occurred to me to ask.) By first putting yourself in mind of these questions, begin simply to write about your topic. Return to this list of questions as you need to. The practical and personal nature of this manner of development ensure that these topics will be of interest, further encouraging each writer to consider. As we look toward the development of a written identity, consider the stance that Olivia takes in this exploratory essay. Guilt is a moral emotion—meaning it is integral in the formation of our own personal set of morals. However, if human beings are inherently selfish, as Thomas Hobbes claims when he says “of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself,” then why do people feel guilty? Many philosophers and psychologists have since refuted claims of inherent human selfishness.

134 

J. S. SCHMIT

Guilt occurs when one experiences conflict after doing something that one believes they should not have done, or having not done something someone believes they should have done. The important distinction between guilt and shame is that shame is due to disregard of social values, while guilt is internally caused when one’s own morals are disregarded. Essentially, guilt is an emotion reflective of one’s perception of events, and shame is one’s perception of themselves as a whole.

Olivia seems less focused on the first-person perspective than one might expect—she does not use the first-person singular pronoun anywhere in the essay—but her considerations within this essay are clearly the products of her own synthesis. She uses a combination of philosophical, psychological and theological sources that, like Montaigne, do not suggest a systematic approach to her subject but rather a set of diverse personal insights. The written identity that emerges is that of a thoughtful, curious, articulate writer at work. Her ability to navigate the complex pieces of this exploration cause us to admire her process of inquiry.

The Role of the Researcher One of the key roles that young writers work to embody is that of the researcher: a seeker of historical, social, and cultural truths. They must develop skills of investigation, integration, synthesis, and evaluation as they review bodies of literature relevant to the ideas they hope to understand better. The following excerpt from a research paper written by Linnea demonstrates the rich voice of a cultural analyst and a literary scholar. Another very important issue developed in Dene Oxendene’s debut chapter is the effect on American Indians of having their land stolen, colonized, developed, and gentrified. The title of the book, There There is repeated in this chapter in the quote from Everybody’s Biography by Gertrude Stein (1937): “There is no there, there.” Dene emphasizes that the reservations— the land—that Native people once inhabited is so developed and unrecognizable now that the sacredness and memories that used to inhabit the land are nowhere to be found. While this is a work of fiction, the issue that Dene brings up is nothing but a stark reality. According to Lizzie Wade, “Indigenous people in the United States have lost nearly 99% of the land they historically occupied” (Wade, 2021). For American Indians, loss of land leads to loss of culture, which leaves behind no ways of identifying with

8  HELPING WRITERS GET RESULTS 

135

a community. As Dene points out, “But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory” (Orange, 2018, p.  39). As for this damaging issue, Dene’s storytelling is more important than ever. Without storytellers, the Indigenous population would be invisible, more than they already are. Crystal EchoHawk, the founder of IllumiNative, provides shocking survey results in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that proves just how invisible Native Americans are in the United States. Just one of the many shocking survey results says, “A significant percentage of Americans weren’t even sure that Native Americans still existed (and believed that, if we did exist, we must be a dwindling population)” (EchoHawk, 2018). The erasure of American Indian culture and stories alongside land and people has been an ongoing tragedy, but the invisibility of living, struggling American Indians is an issue that is more pervasive and harmful than what meets the eye.

One thing that Linnea does particularly well in her role as researcher is to balance a variety of voices, merging them within this single paragraph. While other writing coaches might prefer to see these separate voices distributed among different paragraphs, this paragraph maintains its focus on American Indian lands. The essay eventually makes reference to the federal legislation that made erasure native identity and culture possible. The writer in this case, though, maintains her identity by creating effective transitions in and out of the quotations she uses as evidence for her argument. One last thing to note here is that all four of these writers took on all four of these roles quite successfully as they moved from each written genre to the next. Their success may have been less a product of the coaching they received than of the skill set they had developed over years of writing practice and instruction. Giving them this explicit opportunity to shift roles and enact differing written identities, though, also provided an opportunity for them to display different selves and to receive critiques from their peers and their instructor. Therein, I would argue, lies the value of these exercises in identity projection.

A Few Closing Remarks Among the few artifacts I have saved from my own educational experiences is a first-year English essay I wrote nearly fifty years ago. My work in that class had consistently been judged to be successful, and eventually I

136 

J. S. SCHMIT

got an A in the course. For the most extensive and demanding assignment I was given, on the other hand, I received this comment from my professor: “This is a sound and comprehensive summary of the extant criticism on Crime and Punishment. So, what did you think about the meaning of this work?” That comment was followed by grade of B+. The professor’s name was Eila Permutter, and she taught me a crucial lesson by way of that comment: what matters in the examination of a literary text, especially one as well-documented as this novel by Dostoesky, is not what the research reflects but what the reader constructs. In many ways and at many times I have repeated a version of Professor Permutter’s comment. For a number of years, for example, we began our collective reading list at the Carleton College Summer Writing Program with an analysis of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” I always made of point of telling these students that they, having just read this work, were now part of a club whose membership certainly numbered in the millions. “So now you have read it,” I would say. “So what?” The question isn’t ‘Have you read it?’ but “what do you make of it, and in what ways will you return to your own version of that cave?” And so with that, I pile on David Coleman one last time. People do give a shit what our students think. That is the whole point of higher education and certainly of many educational experiences prior to that point— perhaps most ironically, Advanced Placement courses being among those venues. This is what teachers at all levels of should remember: the work of our students is deeply enhanced by their willingness and ability to construct their own written identities. It is my sincere hope that teachers of writing at all levels ill attempt to drive this effort forward.

References Echohawk, C. (2018). Stolen Land, Stolen Bodies, and Stolen Stories. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Orange, T. (2018). There There. New York: Knopf. Stein, G. (1937). Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Cooper Square, rpt. 1971. Wade, L. (2021). Native Tribes Have lost 99% of their land in the US. https:// www.science.org/content/article/native-tribes-have-lost-99-their-land-unitedstates

Index

A Anzaldua, Gloria, 4 Appleman, D., 13, 14, 32, 68, 83 Austin, J. L., 71 B Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 28 Baker-Bell, April, 9, 10 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14, 15, 32, 68, 76, 83 Bernstein, Basil, 11, 14, 95–100, 102–106, 109–112 Black language (BL), 9, 10, 12 Bolinger, Dwight, 39, 118 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2, 9, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 70–72, 75, 76 Burke, Kenneth, 47 C Chandler, Daniel, 101, 102 Chomsky, Noam, 32, 39, 58, 62, 98, 99

Coleman, David, 21, 25, 44, 74, 128, 136 Crystal, David, 4 D Damasio, Antonio, 45, 46 Delpit, Lisa, 8, 9 Durkheim, Emile, 46, 63 E EF English Proficiency Index, 5 Elaborated codes, 96, 99, 100, 102–105, 107–110, 113 Elbow, Peter, 13 Eliot, T. S., 31 English, Fiona, 21, 76, 77 Ethnic varieties, 12 F Fairclough, Norman, 15, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71–76, 123

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. S. Schmit, The Sociolinguistics of Written Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09563-4

137

138 

INDEX

Field, 11, 65, 66, 70, 75, 79, 80, 82–85, 88, 89, 131 Fillmore, Charles, 72, 124 Freeman, Walter J., 29

L Labov, William, 14, 16, 59, 62, 75, 109 Lakoff, George, 34, 39 Lemke, J. L., 111, 112

G Garfinkel, Harold, 82 Gee, James, 32 Goffman, Erving, 13, 115–116, 124 Granoveter, Mark, 100 Grice, Paul, 106, 123

M McCormick, Christopher, 5 McPhee, John, 36, 124, 125 Metaphor of voice, 24, 25, 30, 32–34 Milroy, Leslie, 14, 70, 99, 101, 103, 111 Mode, 79, 80, 82–84, 88, 123 Montaigne, Michel de, 25–27, 29, 39, 50, 51, 73, 118, 132–134

H Habitus, 63–66, 72 Halliday, M. A. K., 79, 81, 82, 88 Heath, Shirley Brice, 14 Hudson, R. A., 80, 81 Hymes, Dell, 47 I Identity, 1–16, 19–40, 43–55, 57–78, 80, 84, 85, 87–90, 94–96, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110, 116–117, 119–121, 124, 125, 127–136 Interpretive codes, 101, 103 J Jakobson, Roman, 119 Johnson, Mark, 34, 39 Johnstone, Barbara, 61 K Kelly, George, 120 Kinesthetic image schemas, 124–125 Kinneavy, James, 20, 26, 100

O One-down positioning, 48, 85, 86 One-up positioning, 48, 85, 86 P Participatory culture frame, 123 Piaget, Jean, 118 Pinker, Steven, 22, 24, 26, 39, 45 Poetic-aesthetic frame, 121 Process-expressionist frame, 122 R Repairs, 82, 84–87 Restricted codes, 95, 96, 98–100, 102–110 Rosch, Eleanor, 119 Rose, Mike, 8, 64 S Sapir, Edward, 46, 104 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 46, 60, 61

 INDEX 

Searle, John, 30 Simon, John, 2 Sledd, James, 2, 13, 15 Smitherman, Geneva, 4, 9 Social codes, 11, 95, 96, 101, 102 Social distinction, 127 Social practice frame, 122 Social-semiotic frame, 122 Socio-cognitive frame, 122 Socio-discursive domain, 122 Sperling, M., 12–14, 32, 68, 83 Standard English (SE), 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 15, 59–62, 66, 110 Stevens, Wallace, 3, 61 T Tenor, 79, 80, 82–85, 88–90 Texual codes, 101 Theory of mind (ToM), 66, 69, 90, 121

139

Transactional-rationalist frame, 121 Trudgill, Peter, 80 Turner, Mark, 24, 67, 68 V Voice, 3, 4, 8, 12–16, 19–25, 27–39, 43–46, 50–55, 57–62, 64, 65, 68–72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 89, 103, 105, 118, 121–124, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135 W Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 102 Wolfram, Walt, 15 Y Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 9