“Chapter 7: Author And Workin' Languages”
Chapter 7: Author and Workin' Languages
University of Minnesota
Learning Objectives
1. Define self-concept and discuss how we develop our self-concept.
2. Define self-esteem and discuss how we develop self-esteem.
3. Explain how social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory influence self-perception.
4. Discuss how social norms, family, culture, and media influence self-perception.
5. Define self-presentation and discuss common self-presentation strategies.
Just as our perception of others affects how we communicate, so does our perception of ourselves. But what influences our self-perception? How much of our self is a product of our own making and how much of it is constructed based on how others react to us? How do we present ourselves to others in ways that maintain our sense of self or challenge how others see us? We will begin to answer these questions in this section as we explore self-concept, self-esteem, and self-presentation.
Self-Concept
Self-concept refers to the overall idea of who a person thinks he or she is. If I said, “Tell me who you are,” your answers would be clues as to how you see yourself, your self-concept. Each person has an overall self-concept that might be encapsulated in a short list of overarching characteristics that he or she finds important. But each person’s self-concept is also influenced by context, meaning we think differently about ourselves depending on the situation we are in. In some situations, personal characteristics, such as our abilities, personality, and other distinguishing features, will best describe who we are. You might consider yourself laid back, traditional, funny, open minded, or driven, or you might label yourself a leader or a thrill seeker. In other situations, our self-concept may be tied to group or cultural membership. For example, you might consider yourself a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, a Southerner, or a member of the track team.
Men are more likely than women to include group memberships in their self-concept descriptions.
Stefano Ravalli – In control – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Our self-concept is also formed through our interactions with others and their reactions to us. The concept of the looking glass self explains that we see ourselves reflected in other people’s reactions to us and then form our self-concept based on how we believe other people see us (Cooley, 1902). This reflective process of building our self-concept is based on what other people have actually said, such as “You’re a good listener,” and other people’s actions, such as coming to you for advice. These thoughts evoke emotional responses that feed into our self-concept. For example, you may think, “I’m glad that people can count on me to listen to their problems.”
We also develop our self-concept through comparisons to other people. Social comparison theory states that we describe and evaluate ourselves in terms of how we compare to other people. Social comparisons are based on two dimensions: superiority/inferiority and similarity/difference (Hargie, 2011). In terms of superiority and inferiority, we evaluate characteristics like attractiveness, intelligence, athletic ability, and so on. For example, you may judge yourself to be more intelligent than your brother or less athletic than your best friend, and these judgments are incorporated into your self-concept. This process of comparison and evaluation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can have negative consequences if our reference group isn’t appropriate. Reference groups are the groups we use for social comparison, and they typically change based on what we are evaluating. In terms of athletic ability, many people choose unreasonable reference groups with which to engage in social comparison. If a man wants to get into better shape and starts an exercise routine, he may be discouraged by his difficulty keeping up with the aerobics instructor or running partner and judge himself as inferior, which could negatively affect his self-concept. Using as a reference group people who have only recently started a fitness program but have shown progress could help maintain a more accurate and hopefully positive self-concept.
We also engage in social comparison based on similarity and difference. Since self-concept is context specific, similarity may be desirable in some situations and difference more desirable in others. Factors like age and personality may influence whether or not we want to fit in or stand out. Although we compare ourselves to others throughout our lives, adolescent and teen years usually bring new pressure to be similar to or different from particular reference groups. Think of all the cliques in high school and how people voluntarily and involuntarily broke off into groups based on popularity, interest, culture, or grade level. Some kids in your high school probably wanted to fit in with and be similar to other people in the marching band but be different from the football players. Conversely, athletes were probably more apt to compare themselves, in terms of similar athletic ability, to other athletes rather than kids in show choir. But social comparison can be complicated by perceptual influences. As we learned earlier, we organize information based on similarity and difference, but these patterns don’t always hold true. Even though students involved in athletics and students involved in arts may seem very different, a dancer or singer may also be very athletic, perhaps even more so than a member of the football team. As with other aspects of perception, there are positive and negative consequences of social comparison.
We generally want to know where we fall in terms of ability and performance as compared to others, but what people do with this information and how it affects self-concept varies. Not all people feel they need to be at the top of the list, but some won’t stop until they get the high score on the video game or set a new school record in a track-and-field event. Some people strive to be first chair in the clarinet section of the orchestra, while another person may be content to be second chair. The education system promotes social comparison through grades and rewards such as honor rolls and dean’s lists. Although education and privacy laws prevent me from displaying each student’s grade on a test or paper for the whole class to see, I do typically report the aggregate grades, meaning the total number of As, Bs, Cs, and so on. This doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights, but it allows students to see where they fell in the distribution. This type of social comparison can be used as motivation. The student who was one of only three out of twenty-three to get a D on the exam knows that most of her classmates are performing better than she is, which may lead her to think, “If they can do it, I can do it.” But social comparison that isn’t reasoned can have negative effects and result in negative thoughts like “Look at how bad I did. Man, I’m stupid!” These negative thoughts can lead to negative behaviors, because we try to maintain internal consistency, meaning we act in ways that match up with our self-concept. So if the student begins to question her academic abilities and then incorporates an assessment of herself as a “bad student” into her self-concept, she may then behave in ways consistent with that, which is only going to worsen her academic performance. Additionally, a student might be comforted to learn that he isn’t the only person who got a D and then not feel the need to try to improve, since he has company. You can see in this example that evaluations we place on our self-concept can lead to cycles of thinking and acting. These cycles relate to self-esteem and self-efficacy, which are components of our self-concept.
Self-Esteem
Self-esteem refers to the judgments and evaluations we make about our self-concept. While self-concept is a broad description of the self, self-esteem is a more specifically an evaluation of the self (Byrne, 1996). If I again prompted you to “Tell me who you are,” and then asked you to evaluate (label as good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable) each of the things you listed about yourself, I would get clues about your self-esteem. Like self-concept, self-esteem has general and specific elements. Generally, some people are more likely to evaluate
themselves positively while others are more likely to evaluate themselves negatively (Brockner, 1988). More specifically, our self-esteem varies across our life span and across contexts.
Self-esteem varies throughout our lives, but some people generally think more positively of themselves and some people think more negatively.
RHiNO NEAL – [trophy] – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
How we judge ourselves affects our communication and our behaviors, but not every negative or positive judgment carries the same weight. The negative evaluation of a trait that isn’t very important for our self-concept will likely not result in a loss of self-esteem. For example, I am not very good at drawing. While I appreciate drawing as an art form, I don’t consider drawing ability to be a very big part of my self-concept. If someone critiqued my drawing ability, my self-esteem wouldn’t take a big hit. I do consider myself a good teacher, however, and I have spent and continue to spend considerable time and effort on improving my knowledge of teaching and my teaching skills. If someone critiqued my teaching knowledge and/or abilities, my self-esteem would definitely be hurt. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be evaluated on something we find important. Even though teaching is very important to my self-concept, I am regularly evaluated on it. Every semester, I am evaluated by my students, and every year, I am evaluated by my dean, department chair, and colleagues. Most of that feedback is in the form of constructive criticism, which can still be difficult to receive, but when taken in the spirit of self-improvement, it is valuable and may even enhance our self-concept and self-esteem. In fact, in professional contexts, people with higher self-esteem are more likely to work harder based on negative feedback, are less negatively affected by work stress, are able to handle workplace conflict better, and are better able to work independently and solve problems (Brockner, 1988). Self-esteem isn’t the only factor that contributes to our self-concept; perceptions about our competence also play a role in developing our sense of self.
Self-Efficacy refers to the judgments people make about their ability to perform a task within a specific context (Bandura, 1997). As you can see in Figure 2.2 “Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self Concept”, judgments about our self-efficacy influence our self-esteem, which influences our self-concept. The following example also illustrates these interconnections.
Figure 2.2 Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept
Pedro did a good job on his first college speech. During a meeting with his professor, Pedro indicates that he is confident going into the next speech and thinks he will do well. This skill-based assessment is an indication that Pedro has a high level of self-efficacy related to public speaking. If he does well on the speech, the praise from his classmates and professor will reinforce his self-efficacy and lead him to positively evaluate his speaking skills, which will contribute to his self-esteem. By the end of the class, Pedro likely thinks of himself as a good public speaker, which may then become an important part of his self-concept. Throughout these points of connection, it’s important to remember that self-perception affects how we communicate, behave, and perceive other things. Pedro’s increased feeling of self-efficacy may give him more confidence in his delivery, which will likely result in positive feedback that reinforces his self-perception. He may start to perceive his professor more positively since they share an interest in public speaking, and he may begin to notice other people’s speaking skills more during class presentations and public lectures. Over time, he may even start to think about changing his major to communication or pursuing career options that incorporate public speaking, which would further integrate being “a good public speaker” into his self-concept. You can hopefully see that these interconnections can create powerful positive or negative cycles. While some of this process is under our control, much of it is also shaped by the people in our lives.
The verbal and nonverbal feedback we get from people affect our feelings of self-efficacy and our self-esteem. As we saw in Pedro’s example, being given positive feedback can increase our self-efficacy, which may make us more likely to engage in a similar task in the future (Hargie, 2011). Obviously, negative feedback can lead to decreased self-efficacy and a declining interest in engaging with the activity again. In general, people adjust their expectations about their abilities based on feedback they get from others. Positive feedback tends to make people raise their expectations for themselves and negative feedback does the opposite, which ultimately affects behaviors and creates the cycle. When feedback from others is different from how we view ourselves, additional cycles may develop that impact self-esteem and self-concept.
Self-discrepancy theory states that people have beliefs about and expectations for their actual and potential selves that do not always match up with what they actually experience (Higgins, 1987). To understand this theory, we have to understand the different “selves” that make up our self-concept, which are the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self consists of the attributes that you or someone else believes you actually possess. The ideal self consists of the attributes that you or someone else would like you to possess. The ought self consists of the attributes you or someone else believes you should possess.
These different selves can conflict with each other in various combinations. Discrepancies between the actual and ideal/ought selves can be motivating in some ways and prompt people to act for self-improvement. For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so. Discrepancies between the ideal and ought selves can be especially stressful. For example, many professional women who are also mothers have an ideal view of self that includes professional success and advancement. They may also have an ought self that includes a sense of duty and obligation to be a full-time mother. The actual self may be someone who does OK at both but doesn’t quite live up to the expectations of either. These discrepancies do not just create cognitive unease—they also lead to emotional, behavioral, and communicative changes.
People who feel that it’s their duty to recycle but do not actually do it will likely experience a discrepancy between their actual and ought selves.
Matt Martin – Recycle – CC BY-NC 2.0.
When we compare the actual self to the expectations of ourselves and others, we can see particular patterns of emotional and behavioral effects. When our actual self doesn’t match up with our own ideals of self, we are not obtaining our own desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration. For example, if your ideal self has no credit card debt and your actual self does, you may be frustrated with your lack of financial discipline and be motivated to stick to your budget and pay off your credit card bills.
When our actual self doesn’t match up with other people’s ideals for us, we may not be obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including shame, embarrassment, and concern for losing the affection or approval of others. For example, if a significant other sees you as an “A” student and you get a 2.8 GPA your first year of college, then you may be embarrassed to share your grades with that person.
When our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think other people think we should obtain, we are not living up to the ought self that we think others have constructed for us, which can lead to feelings of agitation, feeling threatened, and fearing potential punishment. For example, if your parents think you should follow in their footsteps and take over the family business, but your actual self wants to go into the military, then you may be unsure of what to do and fear being isolated from the family.
Finally, when our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think we should obtain, we are not meeting what we see as our duties or obligations, which can lead to feelings of agitation including guilt, weakness, and a feeling that we have fallen short of our moral standard (Higgins, 1987). For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so due to the guilt of reading about the increasing number of animals being housed at the facility. The following is a review of the four potential discrepancies between selves:
• Actual vs. own ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining our desires and hopes, which leads to feelings of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration.
• Actual vs. others’ ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes for us, which leads to feelings of shame and embarrassment.
• Actual vs. others’ ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting what others see as our duties and obligations, which leads to feelings of agitation including fear of potential punishment.
• Actual vs. own ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting our duties and obligations, which can lead to a feeling that we have fallen short of our own moral standards.
Influences on Self-Perception
We have already learned that other people influence our self-concept and self-esteem. While interactions we have with individuals and groups are definitely important to consider, we must also note the influence that larger, more systemic forces have on our self-perception. Social and family influences, culture, and the media all play a role in shaping who we think we are and how we feel about ourselves. Although these are powerful socializing forces, there are ways to maintain some control over our self-perception.
Social and Family Influences
Various forces help socialize us into our respective social and cultural groups and play a powerful role in presenting us with options about who we can be. While we may like to think that our self-perception starts with a blank canvas, our perceptions are limited by our experiences and various social and cultural contexts.
Parents and peers shape our self-perceptions in positive and negative ways. Feedback that we get from significant others, which includes close family, can lead to positive views of self (Hargie, 2011). In the past few years, however, there has been a public discussion and debate about how much positive reinforcement people should give to others, especially children. The following questions have been raised: Do we have current and upcoming generations that have been overpraised? Is the praise given warranted? What are the positive and negative effects of praise? What is the end goal of the praise? Let’s briefly look at this discussion and its connection to self
perception.
Some experts have warned that overpraising children can lead to distorted self-concepts.
Rain0975 – participation award – CC BY-ND 2.0.
Whether praise is warranted or not is very subjective and specific to each person and context, but in general there have been questions raised about the potential negative effects of too much praise. Motivation is the underlying force that drives us to do things. Sometimes we are intrinsically motivated, meaning we want to do something for the love of doing it or the resulting internal satisfaction. Other times we are extrinsically motivated, meaning we do something to receive a reward or avoid punishment. If you put effort into completing a short documentary for a class because you love filmmaking and editing, you have been largely motivated by intrinsic forces. If you complete the documentary because you want an “A” and know that if you fail your parents will not give you money for your spring break trip, then you are motivated by extrinsic factors. Both can, of course, effectively motivate us. Praise is a form of extrinsic reward, and if there is an actual reward associated with the praise, like money or special recognition, some people speculate that intrinsic motivation will suffer. But what’s so good about intrinsic motivation? Intrinsic motivation is more substantial and long-lasting than extrinsic motivation and can lead to the development of a work ethic and sense of pride in one’s abilities. Intrinsic motivation can move people to accomplish great things over long periods of time and be happy despite the effort and sacrifices made. Extrinsic motivation dies when the reward stops. Additionally, too much praise can lead people to have a misguided sense of their abilities. College professors who are reluctant to fail students who produce failing work may be setting those students up to be shocked when their supervisor critiques their abilities or output once they get into a professional context (Hargie, 2011).
There are cultural differences in the amount of praise and positive feedback that teachers and parents give their children. For example, teachers give less positive reinforcement in Japanese and Taiwanese classrooms than do teachers in US classrooms. Chinese and Kenyan parents do not regularly praise their children because they fear it may make them too individualistic, rude, or arrogant (Wierzbicka, 2004). So the phenomenon of overpraising isn’t universal, and the debate over its potential effects is not resolved.
Research has also found that communication patterns develop between parents and children that are common to many verbally and physically abusive relationships. Such patterns have negative effects on a child’s self efficacy and self-esteem (Morgan & Wilson, 2007). As you’ll recall from our earlier discussion, attributions are links we make to identify the cause of a behavior. In the case of aggressive or abusive parents, they are not as able to distinguish between mistakes and intentional behaviors, often seeing honest mistakes as intended and reacting negatively to the child. Such parents also communicate generally negative evaluations to their child by saying, for example, “You can’t do anything right!” or “You’re a bad girl.” When children do exhibit positive behaviors, abusive parents are more likely to use external attributions that diminish the achievement of the child by saying, for example, “You only won because the other team was off their game.” In general, abusive parents have unpredictable reactions to their children’s positive and negative behavior, which creates an uncertain and often scary climate for a child that can lead to lower self-esteem and erratic or aggressive behavior. The cycles of praise and blame are just two examples of how the family as a socializing force can influence our self-perceptions. Culture also influences how we see ourselves.
Culture
How people perceive themselves varies across cultures. For example, many cultures exhibit a phenomenon known as the self-enhancement bias, meaning that we tend to emphasize our desirable qualities relative to other people (Loughnan et al., 2011). But the degree to which people engage in self-enhancement varies. A review of many studies in this area found that people in Western countries such as the United States were significantly more likely to self-enhance than people in countries such as Japan. Many scholars explain this variation using a common measure of cultural variation that claims people in individualistic cultures are more likely to engage in competition and openly praise accomplishments than people in collectivistic cultures. The difference in self-enhancement has also been tied to economics, with scholars arguing that people in countries with greater income inequality are more likely to view themselves as superior to others or want to be perceived as superior to others (even if they don’t have economic wealth) in order to conform to the country’s values and norms. This holds true because countries with high levels of economic inequality, like the United States, typically value competition and the right to boast about winning or succeeding, while countries with more economic equality, like Japan, have a cultural norm of modesty (Loughnan, 2011).
Race also plays a role in self-perception. For example, positive self-esteem and self-efficacy tend to be higher in African American adolescent girls than Caucasian girls (Stockton et al., 2009). In fact, more recent studies have discounted much of the early research on race and self-esteem that purported that African Americans of all ages have lower self-esteem than whites. Self-perception becomes more complex when we consider biracial individuals—more specifically those born to couples comprising an African American and a white parent (Bowles, 1993). In such cases, it is challenging for biracial individuals to embrace both of their heritages, and social comparison becomes more difficult due to diverse and sometimes conflicting reference groups. Since many biracial individuals identify as and are considered African American by society, living and working within a black community can help foster more positive self-perceptions in these biracial individuals. Such a community offers a more nurturing environment and a buffer zone from racist attitudes but simultaneously distances biracial individuals from their white identity. Conversely, immersion into a predominantly white community and separation from a black community can lead biracial individuals to internalize negative views of people of color and perhaps develop a sense of inferiority. Gender intersects with culture and biracial identity to create different experiences and challenges for biracial men and women. Biracial men have more difficulty accepting their potential occupational limits, especially if they have white fathers, and biracial women have difficulty accepting their black features, such as hair and facial features. All these challenges lead to a sense of being marginalized from both ethnic groups and interfere in the development of positive self-esteem and a stable self-concept.
Biracial individuals may have challenges with self-perception as they try to integrate both racial identities into their self-concept.
Javcon117* – End of Summer Innocence – CC BY-SA 2.0.
There are some general differences in terms of gender and self-perception that relate to self-concept, self-efficacy, and envisioning ideal selves. As with any cultural differences, these are generalizations that have been supported by research, but they do not represent all individuals within a group. Regarding self-concept, men are more likely to describe themselves in terms of their group membership, and women are more likely to include references to relationships in their self-descriptions. For example, a man may note that he is a Tarheel fan, a boat enthusiast, or a member of the Rotary Club, and a woman may note that she is a mother of two or a loyal friend.
Regarding self-efficacy, men tend to have higher perceptions of self-efficacy than women (Hargie, 2011). In terms of actual and ideal selves, men and women in a variety of countries both described their ideal self as more masculine (Best & Thomas, 2004). As was noted earlier, gender differences are interesting to study but are very often exaggerated beyond the actual variations. Socialization and internalization of societal norms for gender differences accounts for much more of our perceived differences than do innate or natural differences between genders. These gender norms may be explicitly stated—for example, a mother may say to her son, “Boys don’t play with dolls”—or they may be more implicit, with girls being encouraged to pursue historically feminine professions like teaching or nursing without others actually stating the expectation.
Media
The representations we see in the media affect our self-perception. The vast majority of media images include idealized representations of attractiveness. Despite the fact that the images of people we see in glossy magazines and on movie screens are not typically what we see when we look at the people around us in a classroom, at work, or at the grocery store, many of us continue to hold ourselves to an unrealistic standard of beauty and attractiveness. Movies, magazines, and television shows are filled with beautiful people, and less attractive actors, when they are present in the media, are typically portrayed as the butt of jokes, villains, or only as background extras (Patzer, 2008). Aside from overall attractiveness, the media also offers narrow representations of acceptable body weight.
Researchers have found that only 12 percent of prime-time characters are overweight, which is dramatically less than the national statistics for obesity among the actual US population (Patzer, 2008). Further, an analysis of how weight is discussed on prime-time sitcoms found that heavier female characters were often the targets of negative comments and jokes that audience members responded to with laughter. Conversely, positive comments about women’s bodies were related to their thinness. In short, the heavier the character, the more negative the comments, and the thinner the character, the more positive the comments. The same researchers analyzed sitcoms for content regarding male characters’ weight and found that although comments regarding their weight were made, they were fewer in number and not as negative, ultimately supporting the notion that overweight male characters are more accepted in media than overweight female characters. Much more attention has been paid in recent years to the potential negative effects of such narrow media representations. The following “Getting Critical” box explores the role of media in the construction of body image.
In terms of self-concept, media representations offer us guidance on what is acceptable or unacceptable and valued or not valued in our society. Mediated messages, in general, reinforce cultural stereotypes related to race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, and class. People from historically marginalized groups must look much harder than those in the dominant groups to find positive representations of their identities in media. As a critical thinker, it is important to question media messages and to examine who is included and who is excluded.
Advertising in particular encourages people to engage in social comparison, regularly communicating to us that we are inferior because we lack a certain product or that we need to change some aspect of our life to keep up with and be similar to others. For example, for many years advertising targeted to women instilled in them a fear of having a dirty house, selling them products that promised to keep their house clean, make their family happy, and impress their friends and neighbors. Now messages tell us to fear becoming old or unattractive, selling products to keep our skin tight and clear, which will in turn make us happy and popular.
“Getting Critical”
Body Image and Self-Perception
Take a look at any magazine, television show, or movie and you will most likely see very beautiful people. When you look around you in your daily life, there are likely not as many glamorous and gorgeous people. Scholars and media critics have critiqued this discrepancy for decades because it has contributed to many social issues and public health issues ranging from body dysmorphic disorder, to eating disorders, to lowered self-esteem.
Much of the media is driven by advertising, and the business of media has been to perpetuate a “culture of lack” (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009). This means that we are constantly told, via mediated images, that we lack something. In short, advertisements often tell us we don’t have enough money, enough beauty, or enough material possessions. Over the past few decades, women’s bodies in the media have gotten smaller and thinner, while men’s bodies have gotten bigger and more muscular. At the same time, the US population has become dramatically more obese. As research shows that men and women are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their bodies, which ultimately affects their self-concept and self-esteem, health and beauty product lines proliferate and cosmetic surgeries and other types of
enhancements become more and more popular. From young children to older adults, people are becoming more aware of and oftentimes unhappy with their bodies, which results in a variety of self-perception problems.
1. How do you think the media influences your self-perception and body image?
2. Describe the typical man that is portrayed in the media. Describe the typical woman that is portrayed in the media. What impressions do these typical bodies make on others? What are the potential positive and negative effects of the way the media portrays the human body?
3. Find an example of an “atypical” body represented in the media (a magazine, TV show, or movie). Is this person presented in a positive, negative, or neutral way? Why do you think this person was chosen?
Self-Presentation
How we perceive ourselves manifests in how we present ourselves to others. Self-presentation is the process of strategically concealing or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions (Human et al., 2012). We engage in this process daily and for different reasons. Although people occasionally intentionally deceive others in the process of self-presentation, in general we try to make a good impression while still remaining authentic. Since self-presentation helps meet our instrumental, relational, and identity needs, we stand to lose quite a bit if we are caught intentionally misrepresenting ourselves. In May of 2012, Yahoo!’s CEO resigned after it became known that he stated on official documents that he had two college degrees when he actually only had one. In a similar incident, a woman who had long served as the dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dismissed from her position after it was learned that she had only attended one year of college and had falsely indicated she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree (Webber & Korn, 2012). Such incidents clearly show that although people can get away with such false self-presentation for a while, the eventual consequences of being found out are dire. As communicators, we sometimes engage in more subtle forms of inauthentic self-presentation. For example, a person may state or imply that they know more about a subject or situation than they actually do in order to seem smart or “in the loop.” During a speech, a speaker works on a polished and competent delivery to distract from a lack of substantive content. These cases of strategic self-presentation may not ever be found out, but communicators should still avoid them as they do not live up to the standards of ethical communication.
Consciously and competently engaging in self-presentation can have benefits because we can provide others with a more positive and accurate picture of who we are. People who are skilled at impression management are typically more engaging and confident, which allows others to pick up on more cues from which to form impressions (Human et al., 2012). Being a skilled self-presenter draws on many of the practices used by competent communicators, including becoming a higher self-monitor. When self-presentation skills and self-monitoring skills combine, communicators can simultaneously monitor their own expressions, the reaction of others, and the situational and social context (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Sometimes people get help with their self presentation. Although most people can’t afford or wouldn’t think of hiring an image consultant, some people have started generously donating their self-presentation expertise to help others. Many people who have been riding the tough job market for a year or more get discouraged and may consider giving up on their job search.
People who have been out of work for a while may have difficulty finding the motivation to engage in the self-presentation behaviors needed to form favorable impressions.
Steve Petrucelli – Interview Time! – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
There are two main types of self-presentation: prosocial and self-serving (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Prosocial self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as a role model and make a person more likable and attractive. For example, a supervisor may call on her employees to uphold high standards for business ethics, model that behavior in her own actions, and compliment others when they exemplify those standards. Self serving self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as highly skilled, willing to challenge others, and someone not to be messed with. For example, a supervisor may publicly take credit for the accomplishments of others or publicly critique an employee who failed to meet a particular standard. In summary, prosocial strategies are aimed at benefiting others, while self-serving strategies benefit the self at the expense of others.
In general, we strive to present a public image that matches up with our self-concept, but we can also use self presentation strategies to enhance our self-concept (Hargie, 2011). When we present ourselves in order to evoke a positive evaluative response, we are engaging in self-enhancement. In the pursuit of self-enhancement, a person might try to be as appealing as possible in a particular area or with a particular person to gain feedback that will enhance one’s self-esteem. For example, a singer might train and practice for weeks before singing in front of a well-respected vocal coach but not invest as much effort in preparing to sing in front of friends. Although positive feedback from friends is beneficial, positive feedback from an experienced singer could enhance a person’s self concept. Self-enhancement can be productive and achieved competently, or it can be used inappropriately. Using self-enhancement behaviors just to gain the approval of others or out of self-centeredness may lead people to communicate in ways that are perceived as phony or overbearing and end up making an unfavorable impression (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002).
“Getting Plugged In”
Self-Presentation Online: Social Media, Digital Trails, and Your Reputation
Although social networking has long been a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, the advent of social media has made the process of making connections and those all-important first impressions much more complex. Just looking at Facebook as an example, we can clearly see that the very acts of constructing a profile, posting status updates, “liking” certain things, and sharing various information via Facebook features and apps is self-presentation (Kim & Lee, 2011). People also form impressions based on the number of friends we have and the photos and posts that other people tag us in. All this information floating around can be difficult to manage. So how do we manage the impressions we make digitally given that there is a permanent record?
Research shows that people overall engage in positive and honest self-presentation on Facebook (Kim & Lee, 2011). Since people know how visible the information they post is, they may choose to only reveal things they think will form favorable impressions. But the mediated nature of Facebook also leads some people to disclose more personal information than they might otherwise in such a public or semipublic forum. These hyperpersonal disclosures run the risk of forming negative impressions based on who sees them. In general, the ease of digital communication, not just on Facebook, has presented new challenges for our self-control and information management. Sending someone a sexually provocative image used to take some effort before the age of digital cameras, but now “sexting” an explicit photo only takes a few seconds. So people who would have likely not engaged in such behavior before are more tempted to now, and it is the desire to present oneself as desirable or cool that leads people to send photos they may later regret (DiBlasio, 2012). In fact, new technology in the form of apps is trying to give people a little more control over the exchange of digital information. An iPhone app called “Snapchat” allows users to send photos that will only be visible for a few seconds. Although this isn’t a guaranteed safety net, the demand for such apps is increasing, which illustrates the point that we all now leave digital trails of information that can be useful in terms of our self-presentation but can also create new challenges in terms of managing the information floating around from which others may form impressions of us.
1. What impressions do you want people to form of you based on the information they can see on your Facebook page?
2. Have you ever used social media or the Internet to do “research” on a person? What things would you find favorable and unfavorable?
3. Do you have any guidelines you follow regarding what information about yourself you will put online or not? If so, what are they? If not, why?
Key Takeaways
• Our self-concept is the overall idea of who we think we are. It is developed through our interactions with others and through social comparison that allows us to compare our beliefs and behaviors to others.
• Our self-esteem is based on the evaluations and judgments we make about various characteristics of our self-concept. It is developed through an assessment and evaluation of our various skills and abilities, known as self-efficacy, and through a comparison and evaluation of who we are, who we would like to be, and who we should be (self-discrepancy theory).
• Social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory affect our self-concept and self-esteem because through comparison with others and comparison of our actual, ideal, and ought selves we make judgments about who we are and our self-worth. These judgments then affect how we communicate and behave.
• Socializing forces like family, culture, and media affect our self-perception because they give us feedback on who we are. This feedback can be evaluated positively or negatively and can lead to positive or negative
patterns that influence our self-perception and then our communication.
• Self-presentation refers to the process of strategically concealing and/or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions. Prosocial self-presentation is intended to benefit others and self serving self-presentation is intended to benefit the self at the expense of others. People also engage in self enhancement, which is a self-presentation strategy by which people intentionally seek out positive evaluations.
Exercises
1. Make a list of characteristics that describe who you are (your self-concept). After looking at the list, see if you can come up with a few words that summarize the list to narrow in on the key features of your self concept. Go back over the first list and evaluate each characteristic, for example noting whether it is something you do well/poorly, something that is good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable. Is the overall list more positive or more negative? After doing these exercises, what have you learned about your self-concept and self-esteem?
2. Discuss at least one time in which you had a discrepancy or tension between two of the three selves described by self-discrepancy theory (the actual, ideal, and ought selves). What effect did this discrepancy have on your self-concept and/or self-esteem?
3. Take one of the socializing forces discussed (family, culture, or media) and identify at least one positive and one negative influence that it/they have had on your self-concept and/or self-esteem.
4. Getting integrated: Discuss some ways that you might strategically engage in self-presentation to influence the impressions of others in an academic, a professional, a personal, and a civic context.
References
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Workin' Languages: Who we are Matters in our Writing
Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Eunjeong Lee
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Overview
The steady increase of movements of people around the world has transformed the face, potential, and expectations of the US writing classroom.* These intersecting shifts have also contributed to critical discussions about how writing educators should integrate students’ linguistic diversity and ways of knowing into literacy instruction. This chapter’s central premise is to share with students how the work that they already do with languages has great value. Specifically, the chapter introduces terms, concepts, and strategies to support students in identifying how their own multilingual workin’ of languages contribute to the making of academic writing. Our goal is to support students in recognizing the value of their own language practices and to provide strategies that students can use to rethink their own relationships with writing. Orienting practices around translingual ism and envisioning students’ language work as that of “language architects” creates opportunities to uplift, value, and sustain students’ rich language practices, as well as ways to critically understand their academic writing experiences.
When you think about writing for school, you’re probably imagining composing “formal/academic writing” where you are trying to make yourself sound like an expert, putting on an objective “academic” tone that can often feel far removed from your own voice. You might have the experience of “cleaning up” your voice to make yourself sound “appropriate,” aware that people who read your writing might make assumptions about how much you know based on what words you use. Because you often move in and out of different languages (beyond English) or lingos—how you communicate with your best friend vs. how you communicate with your coworker at the local electronics store, for instance—you might be trying to filter out variations of your voice for those different ways of communicating. Doing this work, essentially trying to silence your voice, can be exhausting. And honestly, this reduction of your voice can make writing feel difficult, irrelevant, and monotone (aka boring).
The three of us, too, have wrestled with questions like, “How do I bring my own voice into academic writing,” and “How does who I am matter in my writing?” Over the years, we have developed a number of writing strategies and approaches that help us shift away from our own self-doubts and writing hurdles. What if you didn’t have to turn off who you are when you’re writing? What if we shared with you that the different ways you use languages in your everyday life can fortify your writing as you design your academic voice? As we show in this essay, we have gained critical practices to embrace all of our languages as part of who we are, shifting our writing from what’s “appropriate” or “standard” to thinking of our language vision, playfulness, and voice as part of what it means to be a language architect.
Architects, as Professor of Education Dr. Nelson Flores describes, make critical design choices to capture their own unique vision. Dr. Flores ex plains that as designers of meaning, language architects carefully consider how to work with their own languages and voice for the most successful communication in a specific situation (25). In other words, how you speak, act, and negotiate language in uneven power contexts is your working as a language architect. As Dr. Gwendolyn Pough, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, argues about our language and writing, “we all do language. That is our greatest strength” (303). Following Dr. Flores’s and Dr. Pough’s arguments, we pose that in how we “do” language as language architects, we labor, exercise, and push ideas and boundaries about writing. This is what we mean by workin’ languages.
This chapter shares how we, as writers and scholars, and what Dr. Ofelia García, Professor Emerita of Urban and Bilingual Education, calls emergent and experienced bilinguals, work as language architects, and resist those critical feelings that push us to suppress our own voices. We take a research-based stance on how power dynamics and assumptions about language and “good writing” often reinforce the idea of a singular standard and English language form. As we have shown in our scholarly work, such writing “standards” often reflect historical and existent prejudices and in equities in our society that racialize writers and their divergent lived experiences (Alvarez and Wan; Lee and Alvarez). If you’re reading this essay for your writing class, your instructor likely understands this. Therefore, this chapter is also an invitation for you, our reader, to conscientiously inquire into the richness of your own voice in writing, and to critically uptake the work it takes to fully capture this potential in your own writing practice. Your disposition and attitude towards writing, as well as continuous writing practice, are part of the workin’ required to move within and against so-called writing standards.
We begin with a brief discussion of why who you are matters in your writing by introducing how writing scholars have recently discussed the way people do language on a daily basis, specifically about how our ideas about language shape—and at times restrict—how we write in schooling contexts. Then, we share a few strategies that can help you to more actively bring all of your language practices and related experiences in your writing.
Why Who You Are Matters in Your Writing
We want to start by recognizing that embracing who we are in our writing is a journey. It takes time for each of us to feel confident that “I matter in my writing” and comfortable with seeing ourselves as language architects. In our K-to-Ph.D. schooling experiences, the three of us have identified a number of situations that taught us to believe that the full extent of our voices did not belong, matter, or “fit” in “academic or formal” writing settings; even now, we occasionally find ourselves experimenting with new ways of bringing our full selves into our writing. In this manner, we must acknowledge that while schooling spaces may mean well, they often engage ineffective and harmful writing approaches that view the richness of our language(s) as problems to “fix” (Kinloch).
For example, as an international student of color who used to speak English as a non-dominant language, Eunjeong felt pressured to make herself sound less of who she is—a multilingual, transnational, and im migrant-generation scholar with ample experiences with how to work languages. Eunjeong often focused on following the “rules” of writing, mainly “finding” lexical and syntactical “errors,” commas, and article usage. She often sought to be read as “objective” and “neutral.” Subtracting her voice from her own writing was not difficult for Eunjeong given the prevalent focus on English proficiency and stigma surrounding international and immigrant-generation students like her. To Eunjeong, this stigma and standard assumption about how to assess “good” writing is like the air we breathe; it’s always there, and no one needs to point that out to you.
We believe it’s not just Eunjeong who does language in this way. Our various experiences of learning what writing is, and how we should practice it, unfortunately, have often enforced a deficit perspective. When it comes to writing, ideas about what is “appropriate” are often at the heart of judgments about whether writing, and by extension the author, is “good.” These judgments also often connect to what social scientists identify as a process of racialization, by which specific and codified racial meanings are applied to communities of people, their languages and cultural practices. Thus, judgments on “good” writing extend inequities and negative racial codings in our society while suppressing our linguistic and cultural pluralism. More so, these beliefs about good “academic” writing often reinforce so-called standard written English, a way of falsely understanding writing in an English language as objective and monolithic.
Yes, you read this correctly: standard written English is not an objective set of criteria. Instead, it is an ideal that centers a “norm” often conceived as white, upper-middle class, “accentless,” and male, built from a myth that our society needs only one language (without any form of variation) for unity (“Talk American”). Of course, such a belief does not capture our multilingual reality. Many of you, who communicate within families, school, work settings, and online spaces in different languages, likely already know this and have gained great expertise on workin’ languages, even though school and other authoritative bodies might make it seem otherwise. And yet, the idea of standard English powerfully maintains our unequal realities, erasing and/or exoticizing our highly multilingual world. Dr. Flores (mentioned earlier) and Dr. Jonathan Rosa, Professor of Linguistic Anthropology, have crucially pointed out how the idea of standardized English (both written and spoken) as the “appropriate” language relies on the racialization of students, regardless of their actual language use (157-158). For instance, while Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, UK, is praised for engaging her Spanish and English bilingualism, multilingual students, who are viewed through a racializing lens, are often told that their bilingual practice is inadequate in academic spaces.
The narrow understandings of what is “appropriate” and/for academic writing are ideological, that is, based on a dominant system of ideas, so deeply rooted that they seem intangible and unquestionable— “like the air we breathe” as Eunjeong mentions above. And while a writing class alone can’t change existing inequalities and prejudices, it must work to highlight how these values have been constructed, so all of us writers can conscien-tiously challenge how what is considered “good” and “clear” writing greatly depends on this dominant system of values.
Our workin’ of language(s) then reckons with the damage brought on by monolingual ideology. As Dr. April Baker-Bell, Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education, rightly argues in her book on Linguistic Justice, the judgment of Black Englishes in all their rich variant forms as “lesser than” so-called standard English constitutes linguistic racism (16). In this manner, our way of workin’ languages—both what we see as crucial language in our writing and how we do language as language architects—looks toward linguistic and racial justice. What we mean by this is that your voice and all the ways you use it—as part of who you are— makes all the difference, and therefore, should be amplified and cultivated.
Our strong belief that who we are and how we critically use language matters in our writing is sustained by an understanding of language identified as translingualism. An approach that resists monolingual ideology, translingualism views our different and varied language practices as critical in inquiring, supporting, and sustaining the full range of richness in our voices (Horner and Alvarez). Adopting translingual-oriented practices and attitudes means we, as language architects, work to sustain cultural and linguistic pluralism, based on language research and against linguistic injustice. While translingualism as pedagogy should be taken up collectively—by schools and committed educators who are judging and assessing your writing—many of your writing practices can also reflect this trans lingual orientation.
Any time you are about to start a “new” writing assignment, you are already equipped with ample ways of voicing and translating, with tools and ways of knowing. Tuning into the abundance of your voice, identifying its many variations and how these plural ways of voicing work with and for different types of audiences, is a way to continue building on your experiences, your linguistic resources, as language architects. The more you practice your different ways of communicating, the stronger and broader these resources become. Being aware of the richness of your linguistic resources when you write, as well as conscientiously engaging these resources can guide you in becoming a more effective writer, and, more importantly, one that feels more genuine to yourself.
Tuning into Your Strengths:
Strategies and Approaches
In this section, we offer specific ways of using our rich language practices to understand how they might contribute to our academic writing. These writing strategies and practices are oriented by translingualism, as they have been designed to support you in engaging your own linguistic experiences, positionalities, and practices at different moments of composing in a range of writing situations (e.g., traditional alphabetic-based text, multimodal, public writing).
In offering these strategies, we start with a premise: as people who do language on a daily basis in different and plural ways, we/you, writers must work to gain confidence and a sense of pride in our own diverse multilingual practices (Lee and Alvarez). We contextualize this premise in the everyday realities of our world, where linguistic racism and linguistic injustice continue to impact our communities differently. This means that many of us whose languages are racialized in various ways may have to work their academic writing contexts more so, or differently.
Cultivating Your Words
A frequently encountered struggle we face as writers is when the “right” words don’t come to us easily. For instance, as a college senior and a high school English Language Arts (ELA) student-teacher, Sara recalls the experience with a writing assignment for her Secondary Education course and facing a blank MS Word screen for what felt like a number of hours. Sara remembers thinking, “¿Como empezar? The right words aren’t coming to me. I don’t know what is more frustrating, that I know I have a paper due and I can’t get it started, or that I’m actually dedicating this time to my frustration?”
The struggle with finding the “right” words has a lot to do with how we have been taught to censor our voices, how we extend monolingual ideology on ourselves. But one way to counter this struggle is by proceeding to write (sketch, outline, list, draw) whatever words and ideas come to us as we think about the task at hand. Engaging a writing assignment in this form allows us to mess with the writing process, and to open up opportunities for ourselves to hear the many variations of our languages. Once we have some words, ideas, frustrations on paper, we give ourselves small writing tasks, like “just write whatever you can or feel about X topic for 5 minutes.” We might go back to a passage in a related reading and write about our response. We might record ourselves talking and then write down what we find useful. The writing will sound the closest to how we sound in our heads with multiple languages and ways of speaking—the very same way it did for Sara in her mind. This strategy moves us toward the critical and creative aspects that can feel liberating and purposeful about writing, moving us beyond the restrictive forces brought on by monolingual ideology. Instead of treating writing as a technical skill that we either have or not, we, as language architects, design ways to sustain the embodied richness of our voices.
Cultivating our words as language architects compels us to then go back to what we wrote and revise, choosing and shaping what we hope for that specific writing situation—a particular moment, task or assignment. We revisit our writing—as a way to rethink, rewrite, and reconfigure our ideas, but also to better understand ourselves as thinkers. Examining how we shape our writing classifies as editing, one of the critically dynamic aspects of writing revision. Once we work our languages this way, we can shift our attention to lower-priority concerns in writing, such as proofreading. Proofreading refers to those revision practices that focus on checking for lexical norms and other technicalities, such as style manuals, use of commas, and capitalization. In this cyclical and higher-lower priority-oriented process, we are abandoning approaches to writing revision that either look to “weed out” the difference in our language, or simply accept such difference without critically engaging with it. So, yes, even concerns deemed as lower priority deserve some critical inquiry. For instance, throughout the years, Sara has learned to pay closer attention to how individuals idiosyncratically use commas as a way to express emphasis and tonality in their writing.
Sizing up the Situation
Sizing up the situation means tuning into what other people are saying and how they’re saying it. It means surveying and observing the situation as you consider how you will step in. For instance, Amy’s language choices are still informed by a childhood moment when she felt that she could not fully join her family’s mixed English and Cantonese conversation. We think about these moments of trying to understand what’s expected when we’re thinking about how to best approach a writing situation.
To start writing this chapter, for example, one of the first things we did was read previous contributions to Writing Spaces to get a sense of the expected tone and the structure. In reading what fellow writers had done, we wanted to get a feel for what these sounded like and what “moves” the authors made in each piece. Several started with an anecdote, talked directly to readers, and explained a number of scholarly concepts in a straightforward way so that student writers could gain new or further familiarity with these terms. We also noticed that there were always specific suggestions, demonstrations, and examples. Part of doing this examination was also imaginative—how could we contribute to an ongoing conversation and push it forward? How different were the chapters from one another and which could we imagine our chapter being like? But part of this was practical—how many citations were included in each chapter? How did writers move from one idea to another? How many sections did writers use and what was the structure like? We read like writers, as Mike Bunn explained in an earlier volume of Writing Spaces (71-86).
We started writing by mimicking these moves, strategizing what we were seeing in other writings and taking on a similar tone and structure. Sometimes, we could more actively imagine ourselves writing this chapter. Sometimes we couldn’t. And when it seemed like we weren’t sure what to say, we just kept writing (yes, we wrote for 30 minutes to an hour every week), knowing that we could use each other’s and the reviewers’ feedback to revise later. We used this process to think about the expectations of this particular kind of writing. But for us, this strategy was a starting point for getting words going and in tune with the tone of the task. We found that by becoming familiar with the way the other chapters were written, we drew on our own voices with those expectations and our hopes in mind.
Engaging this tuning in practice is not a matter of whether you can or “can’t” write “like that.” Tuning in is about acknowledging that you as a writer can work to identify how your fellow writers make their moves and how you will play yours based on that knowledge—and your own writing purpose. Surveying the situation can then help ease your writing anxieties as you are expected to lean back and analyze the form and function of these other texts, and how writers, like you, like us, play our cards. Sara conceives of this practice as “tuning in without losing your rhythm; remix ing that song you like so much for your own good.”
This process might look different for you; What’s important is: 1) figuring out how you can best gain entry into the context of the situation by sizing it up; 2) negotiating a balance between the expectations of the writing situation and your hopes for your own voice, knowledge, and authority about what you feel is important to say about this topic.
Building a Writing Community
As much as our writing process is about what and how to do language, supporting ourselves throughout the process is equally important. After all, if we can’t make ourselves ‘finish’ (i.e., you have a ‘finished’ version of your writing), all of our efforts for workin’ language won’t be made visible to our readers. The resources to support our writing process can come in many forms and, therefore, can help us see how we can cultivate our writing space, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
For instance, most writing assignments have their own requirements in formatting and content/organization that we are expected to meet. For this reason, when Sara feels that the writing isn’t coming along, and she’s “tried all the things,” she often starts her writing process by checking on the style and structure requirements of writing assignments. Reflecting back on that very same Secondary Education course she took, Sara recalls the following memory: “I have several tabs open: 1) Wikipedia page on the school; 2) school’s official website; 3) 2 PDFs which I’ve highlighted and read before about schooling and teaching writing in urban schools; 4) Purdue OWL’s sample paper for MLA citation format; 5) Purdue OWL’s guidelines for how to incorporate in-text citations. I begin with what seems easiest, likely of less importance, but it literally sets the page. Drawing on the sample paper from Purdue OWL and its instructions, I set up my first page in MLA format. In front of me is the hard copy of the assignment. I go over it, and create a “rough” outline of what I need.”
Like Sara’s example, the resources we draw on to complete a writing assignment can be set by the teacher or other authoritative models we need to consult (such as style guidelines), which may make us feel constrained in tuning into our experiences, positionalities, and language practices. However, we can still center who we are in other aspects of writing by considering how resources can be channeled through the people in our daily lives. You can design your own community of writers that can help you through the process of cultivating your voice and purpose in writing—a friend, a writing center tutor, a family member, someone who you trust and would like to share your ideas with, but also who knows you well and is willing to hear what you care about.
When Eunjeong feels stuck in fully expressing her argument and the connections among ideas, she often turns to her husband. More often than not, in the process of trying to explain, Eunjeong finds a way to resolve the connection she is trying to strengthen in her writing. But also in the process of explaining, her partner, who grew up in a different culture, language, and geographical setting, offer a series of questions or comments: “I saw a similar case for my cousin in [a rural town]”; “This may make sense in Korean, but to me, not sure because…”; “Mexicans do this, and I know my Indian friend’s family did this when I was young”; “Why would you use that word, but not X?”; “How does this relate to what you were talking about earlier?”; “Okay, so you are trying to say Z or something else?”; “What word would that translate to in Korean? Because in American English, I think it wouldn’t translate easily.”
These questions often guided Eunjeong to see where in her writing she needed to “spend more time.” Also, importantly, the people that Eunjeong consults help her to continue writing in ways that acknowledge and amplify different values and experiences of her own and others, and ultimately help sustain her writing. The process and actual conversations in building your own writing community may look and sound different. But what’s crucial is that by working our languages and ideas this way, we centralize not only our voice but also the voices of others who we trust and who care for/about our writing.
Finding Your Audience
We can center who we are in our writing not only through what we write about and how but also in considering who we are writing for. By this, we mean who motivates us to write, who would we want to share this piece of writing with, and who does this writing impact the most? Throughout our schooling, we learn to carry the assumption that we need to write for an “academic” audience that is far removed from our upbringing and community ways of knowing. But rarely are our families, friends, or other community members understood as part of our audience, although they are very the people, including ourselves, that academics learn from, and in turn, are supposed to serve.
What if we think of our audience beyond academics and actively write for people who we share our lived experiences with? What if we foreground their experiences, perspectives, and ways of using language in our writing and start thinking about how our writing impacts ourselves and our communities? These questions likely impact not only the way we understand what is expected of us as writers but also the way we write, including the words we choose, the examples we draw on, and even the amount of details necessary to explain an idea. With “academic” audiences, we often think the expectation is to show how much we know about a particular topic, using “scholarly” articles or other published accounts that support our argument (e.g., summarizing and interpreting a scholar’s work, using quotes and statistics, etc.). Of course, thinking of our audience beyond academia does not mean we won’t do any of this work. But when we see our writing reaching beyond our classroom or university, we can approach writing in a much more personally relevant and just way.
In our own work as educators and researchers, what motivates our research and writing are our own experiences in, with, and as a part of our communities. And along with many of you, we often ask the following questions to centralize our and our communities’ ways of living, knowing, and doing language: How is the discussion in the textbook, articles, or mainstream media relevant to ourselves and our communities? How does what we’re reading represent our unique experiences? For instance, one motivation for us to write this peer-reviewed chapter was that many texts for college writers reinforce monolingual ideology and what is “appropriate,” rather than centering the rich language practices writers, like us, like you, already have.
Writing for our communities can also come down to how we do language in our writing to better reach our communities. This can mean that we might have to go beyond what’s conventionally understood as an “essay,” or even “writing.” For instance, what languages should we use to make our writing most understood by our audience? Is our alphabetic writing the most impactful choice? Should we include images, sound, and colors? How can we best explain an idea? With whose words, stories, experiences, and examples, and in what language(s)?
How you can center yourself and your community in relation to who you’re writing for can certainly go beyond these questions. But your decision to think about your audience beyond “academia” is a way to show that our families, friends, and people in our communities and their lives— their language and cultural practices, histories, and ways of living—and the knowledge from their lived experiences matter. More so, it is a way to confirm what we have learned along the way, that your voice, as connected with that of your communities, shapes and transforms academic writing. In this way, who we are addressing in our writing also becomes a way of demonstrating who matters in our lived realities and experience, in our lives, and who shapes who we are in our writing.
Closing Thoughts
The strategies we’ve discussed here will help you turn to your own translingual-oriented practices, which are, of course, embedded in your own lived experiences and worlds and the ways that you’re already workin’ languages. These approaches centralize your own practices so you can continue languaging and stance-taking away from the deficit perspective in the various writing tasks you might encounter as a student and as a writer in the world. And importantly, translingual stance-taking and workin’ of languages is a work toward linguistic justice for all—particularly for those of us whose languages are racialized in different ways. If the ways that we do language cannot be equal, then as a society we must collectively work to change that.
As you finish this chapter, we hope that you understand that self-doubt about your writing is more often about the people reading and judging your writing than it is about your writing practice. Instead of focusing on what you “lack,” we encourage you to value your language and various experiences in different languages and think of yourself as language architects (Flores), drawing from the way you work with languages in your everyday life, in order to build writing where your full self, the strength of your voice, and the magnitude of your languaging is present, continuously “resistant” and amplified (Kinloch). And we hope you continue to carry that understanding and a loving gaze on your own writing and others’.
Works Cited
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Canagarajah, Suresh. Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing. Routledge, 2019.
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House, Silas. Kentucky Author Silas House Reads from His New Novel, “Southernmost.” YouTube, 1 June 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_qB8OBCkrE Kinloch, Valerie. “‘You Ain’t Making Me Write’: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies and Black Youth’s Performances of Resistance.” Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World, edited by Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, Teachers College Press, pp. 25-41.
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