Composing Social Identity in Written Language

Donald L. Rubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136690273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume constitutes a unique contribution to the literature on literacy and culture in several respects. It links together aspects of social variation that have not often been thus juxtaposed: ethnicity/nationality, gender, and participant role relations. The unifying theme of this collection of papers is that all of these factors are aspects of writers' identities -- identities which are simultaneously expressed and constructed in text. The topic of social identity and writing can be approached from a variety of scholarly avenues, including humanistic, critical, and historical perspectives. The papers in the present volume make reference to and contribute to such humanistic perspectives; however, this book lies squarely within the tradition of social science. It draws primarily upon the disciplines of linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, social and cognitive psychology, and education studies. The constituent topics of social identity, style, and writing themselves lie at the intersections of several related fields of scholarship. Writing remains of peak interest to educators from many fields, and is still a "hot" topic. The instructional ramifications of the particular issues addressed in this volume are of vital concern to educational systems adjusting to the realities of our multicultural society. This publication, therefore, should attract a substantial and diverse readership of scholars, educators, and policymakers affiliated with many fields including applied linguistics, composition and rhetoric, communication studies, dialect studies, discourse analysis, English composition, English/language arts education, ethnic studies, language behavior, literacy, sociolinguistics, stylistics, women's studies, and writing research and instruction.

Chapter One

Introduction: Composing Social Identity

Donald L. Rubin

The University of Georgia

Theme for English B

by Langston Hughes¹

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.

I went to school there, then Durham, then here

to this college on the hill above Harlem.

I am the only colored student in my class.

These steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,

through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,

Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,

the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator

up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me

at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:

hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.

(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like

the same things other folks like who are other races.

So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

But it will be

a part of you, instructor.

You are white—

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American.

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true!

As I learn from you,

I guess you learn from me—

although you’re older—and white—

and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

“Will my page be colored that I write?” the writer queries. “I wonder if it’s that simple?” Of course it is not that simple. The writer is so many things. His identity is multifaceted; ethnicity is but one dimension—albeit a crucial and salient dimension—of that identity. Consider for a moment this: In just now referring to the poem’s student-writer as “he,” I am (reflecting my reading process) ascribing gender identity. Am I justified in reading this writer as a man? I believe I am hearing a male voice in the poem, perhaps issuing from the brief and pithy sentences that are interspersed. Am I instead projecting the historical author’s, that is, Langston Hughes’, biological (if not psychological) gender onto the implied author of the poem? Or am I drawing my gender inference from something as simplistically stereotypical as the implied author’s pipe-smoking persona?

The student-writer in the Hughes poem is justifiably perplexed by the complexity of defining identity (“It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me …”). He recognizes that part of his identity arises from ethnic group membership (“Harlem, I hear you”). And he recognizes that affiliating with a social group implies otherness, implies a boundary that in this case separates the sensibilities of “coloreds” from “whites.”

Yet the writer sees also that he belongs to multiple, overlapping communities (“I hear New York, too”). Some of these community memberships transcend differences among groups (“I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races”). Nor is the writer’s identity some static entity; it evolves even as he interacts with his White instructor. Finally, in addition to being a collection of social affiliations, the writer is a unique individual who, qua individual, likes to “eat, drink, and be in love.”

In “Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes accents for us the key issues regarding social identity and writing. The remainder of this volume can be seen as an attempt to explicate those very issues. In doing so, the contributors to this volume will inevitably be examining some of the essential paradoxes of composing:

1. Writing is at once an individual and a cognitive process, and at the same time a social and a conventional practice.
2. Style is at once a function of the writer’s idiosyncratic identity, and at the same time a function of the social matrix in which the writing and the writer are embedded.
3. Written language both reflects the writer’s identity, and at the same time creates that identity.

Toward a Social Stylistics of Writing

Style Construed as Individuality or Intentionality

Influenced by the belletristic tradition, typical notions of style focus on the writer as an individual. The adage, attributed to Buffon, that “the style is the man” [sic] has guided stylisticians to consider style as an idiosyncratic reflection of an author’s background and—especially—personality (e.g., Ohmann, 1962). The use of stylistic analysis to verify authorship of disputed texts reinforces the view of style as individualistic, much like a fingerprint.

One central issue in traditional stylistic analysis pertains to the role of intentionality in shaping the style of a work. On the one hand, if style is a mirror of deeply ingrained personality traits, then it lies beyond the author’s focal awareness, and it is largely beyond the power of the author to alter. On the other hand, it is certain that skilled writers do make strategic decisions about wording, about what ideas to emphasize, about expressing deference, and the like. To distinguish unintentional clues or “leakage” about the writers’ identity from intentional stylistic strategies, Louis Millic (1971) denoted the former as “stylistic option” and the latter as “rhetorical choice.”

Style Construed as a Social Marker

No doubt a writer’s individual identity (i.e., unique personality) is a major determinant of both stylistic options and rhetorical choices. But as we come to see writing, increasingly, as a social activity, we recognize that there is a social stylistics to written language as well. Stylistic options “leak” clues about writers’ social identities. Rhetorical choices help writers construct the social identities they wish to project in given writing episodes. That is perhaps the most important theme of this volume of articles: Written language reflects or conveys a writer’s social identity, but it also constructs or instantiates it.

Consider the following excerpts from a letter published in The New York Times (Pastre, 1991), written by a victim of a notorious crime against a family of tourists in New York City in 1991. Most likely the letter was subject to some professional editing, yet it illustrates the central principles of social stylistics:

… My parents and I are French. We were visiting New York City when we were attacked by a thief … What do I do now? Do I scream in French or in English? I tried both. And then this nasty guy turned back and faced me, violence in his eyes. I could react against his threats and screaming, but when he grabbed this brick and hit my head with it, I could only disbelieve he would do it … I saw all this crowd of kids around me. They were between 12 and 18, maybe intrigued by this bleeding stranger screaming. Were they with me or against me? I feel bad now just to have had a doubt about it. They were black. They were from Harlem. And they were with me. And they were throwing bottles and cans at the nasty guy. I cannot explain the feelings and the emotion to see all of them helping me, the white, the stranger, the rich … I still like New York. I still like Harlem. He hurt my father and he could have killed me. Justice has to be done. Thank you.

As a matter of rhetorical choice, the writer explicitly reveals his ethnic identity as a White French person, as well as his social class (he’s rich). These rhetorical choices certainly lend the letter a greater coherence than had the information been omitted. Notwithstanding those explicit revelations about social identity, the written language itself contains stylistic options that strongly mark this writer at least as a non-native writer/speaker of English. Experienced teachers of English as a second language will be familiar with the slightly off-idiom tone that results from expressions like “I could only disbelieve he would do it” or “had a doubt about it” (as opposed to “had any doubt” or “had doubts”).

In terms of organizational structure, the abrupt shift from “I still like Harlem” to “He hurt my father … Justice has to be done” seems like an odd rhetorical turn to American readers. Perhaps, though, it does issue from some characteristic trait of Gallic argumentation (Kaplan, 1966). In these respects, this piece of discourse deviates from standard edited English (SEE) and marks its author as other than a standard American. Most readers would agree, I am confident, that this social marking is both appropriate and forceful in this instance.

Socio-Stylistic Features as “Interference” in Writing

In the past, composition researchers as well as teachers have regarded stylistic markers of social identity in writing mainly as elements of interference. Some have claimed that nonstandard dialect interferes with writing (Wolfram & Whiteman, 1971), some have considered second-language interference in writing (Lay, 1975), and some have hypothesized that female-typical language may constitute another form of interference in writing (Smeltzer & Werbel, 1986).

This tendency to treat demographic markers in writing as sources of interference is predicated on the notion that communicative success and positive evaluation requires “unmarkedness” in discourse style, that is, requires conformity with the standard language forms (Banks, 1987). Voiceless, genderless, identity-less prose is the most desirable, according to this view. To be sure, deviance from SEE in the form of mechanical errors does undermine perceived quality of writing (e.g., Rafoth & Rubin, 1984).

Sociolinguistic Interference as a Reader Response. But the relationship between actual error and perceived error, and between actual social identity, and perceived social identity is not always straightforward. Error is very much in the mind of the beholder (Williams, 1982). In studies of speech evaluation, for example, listeners perceive error and identity according to their stereotyped expectations; if they are given false information that a speaker is non-native, they discern linguistic deviance, and their comprehension actually suffers (Rubin, 1992). Similarly, writing evaluators are not always accurate in discerning the actual social identities of writers. But if they decide (for any reason, plausible or not) that a particular writer is a member of a socially stigmatized group, then they are more likely to perceive the writing as nonstandard and error-laden (Piché, Rubin, Turner, & Michlin, 1978).

The locus of interference, therefore, lies at least as much in the readers’ expectations of writers from certain social groups as in the writers’ actual manner of marking social identity by using nonstandard forms.

One mind set, therefore, equates any social “deviance” with error in writing. A second point of view—perhaps a shade more humane—regards social markers as interference in the sense that they draw the reader’s attention away from the intended effect of the message. The reader becomes distracted with supposedly irrelevant aspects of the writer’s identity. According to this view, a writer’s message has a better chance of affecting the reader if it is socially “unmarked,” if the author is invisible. Richard Lloyd-Jones (1981) remarked in a not altogether disapproving tone that, “[O]ne can almost say that the objective of the schools is to acquaint all students with the blandest forms of English, the forms of least commitment, the forms of superficial order” (p. 174). In a like vein, a middle school teacher tells a student-writer:

You are right that everyone will understand you if you say, “The Earth ain’t nobody’s personal property.” But your readers will be so busy thinking about what kind of person you are to be saying, “ain’t no,” that they won’t pay any attention to what you’re really trying to get across to them.

The Myth of Socially Unmarked Style in Writing. Even this communication-based notion of social markers as interference is flawed, however. First, it is erroneous to suppose that the author can ever be invisible. True, the actual social identity of the historical author can be effaced. Such has often been the case of the woman writer who wishes to be taken seriously, to succeed commercially and critically (Heilbrun, 1988). But no text can be completely devoid of persona, without voice. Even a text composed collaboratively among members of a corporate entity—say an article published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, to which authors’ names may not be ascribed if they are employees of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—evokes some sense of authorship among readers. True, the constructed author’s identity may well be disembodied from any corporeal individual. Indeed, that is the avowed objective of many professional writers: to become proficient in projecting a consistent organizational identity in their writing.

Second, it is a myth that any style can achieve unmarkedness. What linguists and stylisticians sometimes call “unmarked forms” are really just normative forms, that is, representing social and political prestige (Banks, 1987; Penelope, 1990). Use of SEE is not unmarked. If it does not always signal membership in the dominant culture, at very least SEE marks acceptance of, aspiration to, and complicity with mainstream definitions of status. (See Rubin, Goodrum, & Hall, 1990, for a critique of the notion of interference from an instructional perspective.)

Socio-Stylistic Features as Markers of Affiliation or Accommodation in Writing

The Obligatory Nature of Socio-Stylistic Marking in Writing. The claim here, then, is that writing style is never devoid of social marking, never really unmarked. It is useful, therefore, to think of writers as selecting (by virtue of some obligatory sociolinguistic rule) from among socio-stylistic variants and thereby projecting a social identity. Conversely, readers construe author identity based on their associations with socially distributed features of language and discourse. This view presumes that stylistic variants that may be more or less referentially equivalent may yet carry with them differing social presuppositions (Keenan, 1971).

In speech, if I call you tu instead of vous, I am presupposing (whether rightly or wrongly) high solidarity and low power differential between us (Brown & Gilman, 1960). If I speak to you in the local rural dialect rather than in the dialect of national literacy, I am accentuating that aspect of my identity that is more communal and less cosmopolitan (Blom & Gumperz, 1972). If I am an educated South African and I insist on speaking to you in Afrikaans instead of in English, I may be asserting the salience of my ethnic identity.

In writing, as well as in speech, I convey my social identity by selecting from among stylistic variants. For example, Serbian resistance to Romanization of its Cyrillic orthography during the former Yugoslav regime (see Fishman, 1988) can in retrospect be seen as a harbinger of the nationalistic aspirations that fuel the tragic Balkan wars of the 1990s. In a less obvious fashion, I may signal or invoke my social identity as a first-language literate in Spanish by writing long sentences with little punctuation (se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Composing Social Identity
• Part I: Composing Ethnolinguistic Identity
• Part II: Composing Gender Identity
• Part III: Composing Writer–Audience Role Relations
• Author Index
• Subject Index