By Communication Consultant Carolyn Simmet (Management and Supply Chain Management, ’21)

Social identities largely impact our literacy. The way we write, read, and comprehend are all uniquely dependent on our cultural backgrounds and identities. Our style and voice is shaped by our personalities and impacts our grammatical and rhetorical choices. To acknowledge these differences based on social identities is one thing, but to understand and use our differences as an advantage in writing is another.

Adam Daut, a graduate student at Arizona State University, explores how social identities play a key role in our writing. He presents a variety of methods to help writers and tutors incorporate our selves into our writing and other linguistic work at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. Two of these methods include creating a social identity map and writing our own literacy narratives.

Social Identity Map

One way we can ensure we are using our differences in our writing is by creating a social identity map. You can do this by making a big circle around your first and last name on a sheet of paper. Then, you start drawing lines outside of the big circle to smaller circles with descriptive characteristics written inside. These characteristics could include: religion, education, gender, socioeconomic status, class, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and so on. From there, you can continue to draw lines outward to elaborate on the labeled identities. For example, you can draw a line from religion to explain your beliefs, or from gender to preferred pronouns, or from education to the different places studied and the degrees received. You can talk with a peer or a tutor about how your writing reflects your identities; the insights you gain will help you develop your voice and communicate more authentically.

Literacy Narratives

Another way we can express ourselves through our writing is by creating our own literacy narratives. To write a literacy narrative, write about your experiences with reading, writing, and communicating. When did you learn to read and write? What important lessons have you learned about literacy? How do you use literacy and communication? Writing our own literacy narratives allows us to create relationships through our writing and self reflection. Sharing literacy narratives with fellow writers or a tutor can lead to group discussion and personal development. Literacy narratives help us understand what directly impacts our thoughts and writing, which helps us learn what we do and do not like. 

At the RCBC, we can best help with writing when we take the time to understand you as an individual. We can do this by getting to know our students prior to jumping into work. We can also do this by looking at our unique names or creating a social identity map for ourselves and our students. We prioritize providing unique guidance to each individual that utilizes our services. Rather than providing the same suggestions and advice to each student, we ensure each student’s writing style is emphasized. After all, the ways we write are unique and impacted by our social identities.

Get information and resources about our center at The Philip Rauch Center for Business Communication.