Identity of the scholar writer: Writing workspace and behavior as writers
Submitted by:
Hanna Ezer
Abstract:
This qualitative narrative study examines the writing workspace of academic scholars as well as their behavior as writers and its relation to their identity as writers in the academic community.
Identity theory highlights an hyphenated identity that varies according to context (Pennington & Richards, 2016). This concept is relevant to writing because language is one of the means of conveying social identities (Burgess & Ivanic, 2010).
To open the presentation, the principal researcher describes the study, the qualitative narrative methodology, main findings and its implications to the teaching of writing.
The main findings (Ezer, 2016) reveal that the writing environment is both a physical and a metaphysical space that nourish one another. In this space the writer's behavior is primarily rhizomatic for it moves in different directions in space and is non-linear, simultaneous and full of deflections, mainly of daily life that become integrated with the writer's life.
Then, two of the 23 interviewees in this study present their personal narratives that inwardly examine their own behavior as writers and their writing workspace.
The first interviewee presents her concept of workspace. This concept challenges feminist ideas about writing by means of an intertextual journey through her personal life as reflected in personal photos, places she has lived and books and papers she has written.
In a linguistic analysis of a text she produced, the second interviewee tells about her academic writing in her writing workspace. she deals with the coherence between language and content by demonstrating how linguistic forms serve subjective aspects/components of the story.
Key words: writer’s identity; the writing self; the scholar writer; writing workspace; writer's behavior
Burgess, A., & Ivanic, R. (2010). Writing and being written: Issues of identity across timescales. Written Communication, 27 (2), 228-255.
Ezer, H. (2016). Sense and sensitivity: The identity of the scholar writer in academia. Rotterdam/Taipei/Boston: Sense Publishers.
Pennington, M.C., & Richards, J.C. (2016). Teacher identity in language teaching: Integrating personal, contextual, and professional factors. RELC Journal (A journal of Language Teaching and Research ), 47(1), 5-23.