From contrastive rhetoric to intercultural rhetoric: Why intercultural rhetoric needs to reframe the concept of culture

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Forum: the case for reflexive writing practices in management communication and organization studies

Following criticism about the quality of writing in management communication and organization studies, this Forum presents arguments for change in how scholarly knowledge is communicated. The expectation today seems to be that, to get published, academic writing requires monologic and complex ways of expression. However, using formulaic and reader-exclusive language in publications limits their accessibility to a wider readership, including not only more diverse members of the disciplinary community—such as non-Anglophone scholars and junior researchers—but also those we study and write about. In our respective contributions, we argue for more meaningful communication between writers and readers achieved through writers adopting reflexive practices when crafting their texts for publication. Specifically, we suggest considering reflexivity through the following concepts: conformity and individuality, socialization, tenderness, and respect. These, we argue, help make our academic writing more accessible and meaningful

Writing to make a difference : discursive analysis of writer identity in research articles on management

Our purpose in this research is to quantitatively analyse how the communication of managerial knowledge is realised in research articles written by experienced writers for publication and those produced by graduate students as a course grade requirement. Specifically, we look at the ways these writers construct their authorial identities (textually conveyed in ‘voice’). To do so, we combine Hyland’s (2008) interactional model of voice with Lehman's (2018) and Lehman and Sułkowski's (2021) conceptualisation of ‘writer identity.’ The study results reveal important differences with regard to the expression of interaction in written discourse, with novices employing more interpersonal features to involve readers and experienced authors making linguistic choices to establish authority in their texts. We show that the use of interpersonal metadiscourse renders academic texts more accessible, reader engaging and interesting. This enables us to work towards the development of more effective writing instruction which is particularly relevant for English for Academic Purposes pedagogy

The role of reader-inclusive authorial voice in the process of academic socialization of Management and English Philology students

Our purpose in this paper is to throw light on the tension, or even internal conflict, tertiary-level students experience when they struggle to negotiate the rhetorical norms of disciplinary writing and the changes in their authorial voice that necessarily occur in this socialization process. With this goal in mind, we designed and conducted the study to gain insights into the perceptions Management and English Philology students have as to what constitutes a convincing authorial voice and the discourse-level features employed to realize this. Twenty-six study participants created a diverse group with regards to nationality, gender, study level, disciplinary affiliation and cultural and linguistic background. Their evaluations of voice were first analyzed from their responses to a questionnaire and then expanded through interviews. The findings reveal that a reader-inclusive voice, which requires the use of de-jargonized language, clear purpose and structure, and creates room for reader’s own interpretation, is crucial for a text to be convincing. We also argue that students’ preference for reader-sensitive academic writing should be supported and encouraged through the provision of strategic academic writing pedagogy.

Dual voicing of Asian American writers: the case of Amy Tan

Dual voicing of Asian American writers: the case of Amy Ta

The Reconstruction of the Identity of Bilingual AuthorsThrough First-Person Tellings: Gain or Loss?

The paper focuses on the problem of the mechanisms underlying second language (L2) writers’ identity construction as shown in the life stories of authors who have struggled to become assimilated in a new language and culture. The memoir of Polish-English bilingual, Eva Hoffman, will be analyzed to establish first-person tellings as a source of credible, compelling and informative evidence of identity reconstruction in the process of linguistic and cultural border crossing

Social Identification and Positioning in Academic Discourse: An English-Polish Comparative Study

This article sets out to present the critical role of positioning theory and social identification theory in the discoursal analysis of authorial presence in academic texts by focusing on the dynamic nature of writer identity. Drawing on Harré’s, Fairclough’s and Hall’s work, and my own focus on the relationship between students’ identities and their experience of academic writing, I claim that discoursal identity often establishes itself in relation to difference and that it refers to the various “selves” which writers employ in the act of writing, which locates identity in socio-cultural and institutionally defined subject positions. An empirical case is then presented. It consists of a description of my own semi-ethnographic study1 on the co-construction of authorial identity in student writing in both English and Polish, focusing on the findings of the macro-level analysis of a text corpus. The findings of the study support my other claim that authorial identity is a dynamic concept which cannot be determined entirely by socio-cultural or institutional factors, but is unique for each writer and can be negotiated and changed