Disciplinary Identities

Abstract

Disciplinary Identities uses findings from corpus research to present fascinating insights into the relationship between author identity and disciplinarity in academic writing. Ken Hyland draws on a number of sources, including acknowledgements texts, academic homepages and biographies, to explore how authors convey aspects of their identities within the constraints placed upon them by their disciplines' rhetorical conventions. He promotes corpus methods as important tools in identity research, demonstrating the effectiveness of keyword and collocation analysis in highlighting both the norms of a particular genre and an author's idiosyncratic choices. Identity is conceived as multi-faceted and socially negotiated, and writing is seen as the contextualised performance of the author's identity to a community of readers. Hyland concludes by outlining a way forward for encouraging individuality as well as conventionality in students of EAP.