Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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Genre, discipline and identity

Ken Hyland
Centre for Applied English Studies, CAES Office, 6th Floor, Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In Genre Analysis Swales encouraged us to see genres in terms of the communities in which
Available online xxx they are used and as a function of the choices and constraints acting on text producers. It is
this sensitivity to community practices which make genre a rich source of insights into two
Keywords: key concepts of the social sciences e community and identity. In this paper I take up these
Genre themes to explore the relationships between community expectations and the individual
Identity
writer. To do so I use a corpus approach to recover evidence for repeated patterns of
Academic writing
language which encode disciplinary preferences for different points of view, argument
Corpus analysis
Proximity
styles, attitudes to knowledge, and relationships between individuals and between in-
Positioning dividuals and ideas. The paper attempts to show how genre can offer insights into the ways
actors understand both the here-and now interaction (the context of situation) and the
broader constraints of the wider community which influence that interaction (the context
of culture), revealing something of actors' orientations to scholarly communities and the
ways they stake out individual positions.
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Genres: constraints and schema

Few concepts have had a greater impact on how we understand and teach language than genre. The idea that prior texts
have a key role in shaping communicative practices has been so influential for so long that it is hard to imagine how discourse
analysts, or EAP practitioners, ever got along without it. Strictly, of course, the term refers to abstract, socially recognised ways
of using language, but like any well-worn concept, genre is understood in a variety of ways: from an emphasis on context and
Bakhtinian notions of intertextuality and dialogism (e.g. Coe, 2002) to descriptions of configurations of systematic language
choices (e.g. Martin, 2012). John Swales's contribution, which we celebrate in this volume, has been to steer a path which
acknowledges both these traditions and carves out a distinctive space for the ‘ESP’ concept by focussing on the texts and
practices which are recognised and valued by specific communities. In Genre Analysis (Swales, 1990) and beyond, Swales has
encouraged us to see genres in terms of the communities in which they are used and to understand texts as a function of the
choices and constraints acting on text producers.
He has also shown us that genres are not merely collections of similar texts but the schema we develop through our shared
experiences to see how these texts help construct particular contexts. They are Bazerman's (197: 17) “frames for social action”
and provide the sightlines by which we orient to our environment and create meanings. Swales's work has helped us to see
how the inhabitants of academic communities use the regularities of genres to develop relationships, reinforce and challenge
their communities, float and dispute ideas, and generally get things done. As a result, we now know a lot more about the
conventions that characterise certain genres and discourse communities (Hyland, 2004; Swales, 2004), how such conventions

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come into being, how they change over time, how they give rise to new genres, and how, in turn, they influence and are
influenced by community practices, beliefs and other genre systems (Berkenkotter, 2001; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995).
So genres are community resources which allow users to create and read texts with some assurance that they know what
they are dealing with. They enable the particularities of any situation to connect with wider norms and practices. This is not
because members rationally decide that these norms are sensible, but because constant exposure to a discourse leads them to
work out what norm the group favours. Choices are narrowed to the point where we don't have to decide on every option
available. As O'Sullivan, Hartley, Saunders, Montgomery, and Fiske (1994: 128), have it, ‘genres are agents of ideological
closure e they limit the meaning-potential of a given text’. But this sensitivity to community-based uses of language, together
with a search for pedagogically appliable generalisations, has made this model of genre vulnerable to accusations of struc-
turalist straightjacketing which ignores individual creativity and textual variability. This paper challenges this view and
instead suggests that the perspective Swales outlined in his 1990 book provides the basis for an understanding of genre which
offers insights into two of the most problematic concepts in the social sciences: discipline and identity.

2. Proximity and positioning

It is true that many attempts to pin down these “typified acts of communication” have tended to emphasise similarity
rather than difference and conformity at the expense of flexibility, but the idea has also enabled us to see more clearly how
writers and readers rely on their inside knowledge to create a mutual frame of reference and ensure their purposes will be
retrieved by their audiences. At the same time, we have learnt to see genres as broad guides to action rather than as con-
straining templates and to understand that there is some scope for individuals to improvise or play with genres (Devitt, 2011;
Schryer, 2011). More relevantly in academic contexts we have begun to explore how individuals are able to exploit genre
options to create some personal wriggle-room and express a persona they feel comfortable with. I have referred to this fit
between rhetorical conventions and the persona one wishes to project as a distinction between proximity, or the relationship
between the self and community, and positioning, the relationship between the speaker and what is being said (Hyland, 2012).
Proximity implies a receiver-oriented view of communication and is closely related to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's
(1974: 272) notion of “recipient design”, or how talk is shaped to make sense to the current interactant. Writers, no less
than speakers, construct texts which engage with readers and display a community-based competence and valued identity, as
lexical choice, topic selection, conventions of argument, and so on also display an orientation and sensitivity to co-
participants. Proximity ties the individual into a web of disciplinary texts and discourses, allowing authors to create a text
they assume the reader will recognise and expect and readers to draw on assumptions about what the writer is trying to do.
While proximity highlights shared social representations which provide broad templates for recognising ‘the ways things are
done’, positioning emphasises how writers appropriate these discourses to make a name for themselves and stand out from
the crowd (e.g. Davies & Harre , 1990). Engaging in disciplinary genres does not involve stepping into a pre-packaged self as
individuals can use the options available to position themselves in terms of a personal stance and interpersonal alignments.
Genre constraints are simultaneously the enabling conditions for originality.
Genre, then, is the interface between individual and community: the ways that academics who, at the same time as they
construct their texts, also construct themselves as competent disciplinary members who have something worthwhile to say.
The remainder of this paper is an attempt to elaborate these ideas and extend what Swales's notion of genre has to say about
the relationships between community expectations and the individual writer, about community and individuality.

3. Discipline and community

Community is a somewhat troubled concept and has been in and out of favour among genre analysts almost since Swales
linked it with genre in 1990. Treated with suspicion by both Thatcherite individualists and those worried by its more
structuralist and static interpretations, the notion of community has had a chequered past. Few communities, however, are
either fixed or entirely harmonious and those based around occupation, recreation, family, and so on, provide meaningful
reference points which help shape collective definitions of membership and identity within their frameworks of un-
derstandings and values. Communities can be seen as sites of engagement rather than of commitment, providing a shorthand
for the practices and discourses routinely used by a particular group. Swales recognised this in his later conceptualisation
(Swales, 1998), where he shifts his idea of communities from a focus on goals to a way of “being in the world”, of interacting
with colleagues and the acts which comprise the creation of community knowledge. Essentially, communities provide the
context within which we learn to communicate and to interpret each other's talk, gradually acquiring the specialised
discourse competencies to participate as members. They are the places we craft our identities, cement relationships and
achieve recognition, where we find the tools and resources to live out our professional lives. We can therefore see disciplines
as language using communities which help us join writers, texts and readers together (see, for example, Geertz, 1973).
In EAP, the idea of community is generally associated with that of discipline as we have become more sensitive to the ways
genres are written and responded to by individuals acting as members of scholarly groups. But while a common enough label,
disciplines have been seen as institutional conveniences, networks of communication, political institutions, domains of
values, modes of enquiry, and ideological power-bases. Some writers, in fact, see the term as little more than a convenient
shorthand for practices that are less distinguishable and stable than we usually suppose (e.g. Mauranen, 2006) while others,
writing from Post-modern positions, argue that the fragmentation of academic life has resulted in the death of disciplines (e.g.

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 K. Hyland / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12 3

Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996). Clearly, local struggles, intellectual developments and institutional convenience ensure that
boundaries are never stable nor objects of study fixed in stone. As Becher and Trowler (2001: 65) observe, ‘there is no single
method of enquiry, no standard verification procedure, no definitive set of concepts that uniquely characterises each
particular discipline’.
Discipline is, however, a notion with remarkable persistence and the distinctive existence of disciplines can be informed by
study of their rhetorical practices. This is because successful academic writing depends on the individual writers' projection of
a shared professional context as they seek to embed their writing in a particular social world which they reflect and conjure
up through approved discourses. Members have a sense of being part of a discipline and of having a stake in something with
others. So we can see disciplines as particular ways of doing things e particularly of using language to engage with others in
certain recognised and familiar ways e and it is the enactment of these uses that I am referring to as proximity. Academic
texts are about persuasion and this involves making choices to gain support, express collegiality and resolve difficulties in
ways which fit the community's assumptions, methods, and knowledge. This is how Wells (1992) sees matters:
Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experience that has evolved over generations and each is
dependent on its own particular practices: its instrumental procedures, its criteria for judging relevance and validity, and its
conventions of acceptable forms of argument. In a word each has developed its own modes of discourse.
To work in a discipline, then, we need to be able to engage in these practices and, in particular, in its discourses. We need to
proximate to the rhetorical conventions it routinely employs to claim membership and learn how to use these conventions to
take positions on matters the community values. In this context genres play a key role as they are the institutionally rec-
ognised ways of producing agreement. They are the oil which keep disciplines running. The most productive way to get at
these community approved and personally meaningful discourses is through corpora. ESP genre analysts have taken to
corpora with some enthusiasm precisely because they reveal these constraints and contexts in the repeated patterns of
everyday language use. Moreover, by showing how language is typically used in a given context, corpora offer evidence of
actors' orientations to scholarly communities and the ways they stake out individual positions. Because identity comprises
dispositions to behave in certain ways, to make particular discourse choices in routine situations, these enactments of identity
can be recovered in corpus analyses.
Genre, as revealed through the study of corpora, can therefore not only tell us something about the broad community
constraints which influence interaction (the context of culture), but also how actors understand the here-and now of
interaction (the context of situation) itself. They can also reveal the ways members rhetorically craft proximity and
positionings.

4. Genres and the construction of disciplines

Thus far the discussion has been rather abstract, but in Genre Analysis Swales suggested ways in which we might unpick
the rhetorical complexities of texts to reveal something of the ways they express community practices. In this section I
ransack some of my earlier work to show how genres realise disciplines through the routine performance of rhetorical ac-
tions. This is the exercise of proximity: how the preferred ways of crafting meanings constructs individuals as members.
Swales's ‘Genre Analysis’ reveals something of how successfully engaging in the discourses of one's discipline, as a student,
researcher or teacher, involves making rhetorical choices which instantiate key epistemological and social beliefs of that
discipline. Writers represent themselves and their work in different ways, with those in the humanities and social sciences
taking far more explicitly involved and personal positions than those in the science and engineering fields (Hyland, 2004,
2005). While the hard-soft distinction is a blunt instrument to elaborate these differences, it helps reveal some of the
ways that authoring involves writers relating their rhetorical choices to wider social and academic understandings. Some
examples of these differences are shown in Table 1, based on the analysis of features in a corpus of 120 research articles from
the ten leading journals in 8 disciplines, comprising 1.4 million words (Hyland, 1999, 2002, 2005).
Most predictably, we find that authors in the soft knowledge disciplines intrude into their texts through use of ‘I’ or ‘we’
almost three times more frequently than scientists. This allows them to both claim authority through personal conviction and
to emphasise their contribution to the field. It sends a clear indication to the reader of the perspective from which statements
should be interpreted and distinguishes the writer's own work from that of others. But while self-mention can help construct
an authoritative authorial self in the humanities, authors in the hard sciences generally seek to downplay their personal role
to highlight the phenomena under study, the replicability of research activities, and the generality of the findings. They
distance themselves from interpretations with a higher use of the passive voice (1), dummy ‘it’ subjects (2), and the attri-
bution of agency to inanimate things (3):

Table 1
Selected features across fields (per 1000 words).

Fields Self-mention Citation Self-citation Hedges Boosters Directives

Arts/humanities 34.2 11.1 0.4 17.5 6.9 1.2
Science/engineering 12.1 5.8 0.6 10.25 4.5 2.5

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(1) This suggestion was confirmed by the observation that only plants carrying the pAG-I::GUS transgene showed a
gain of GUS staining in leaves of clf-2 plants. (Biology)
(2) It was found that a larger stand-off height would give a smaller maximum shear strain when subjected to thermal
fatigue … (Mechanical Engineering)
(3) The images demonstrate that the null point is once again well resolved and that diffusion is symmetric (Physics)
Instead of using the first person to demonstrate an individual contribution and establish a claim for priority, scientists
display their proximity to the norms of their communities through decisions which rely on the persuasive force of lab
procedures rather than the force of their writing.
Similarly, Table 1 shows that citation practices also differ enormously, reflecting the extent writers can assume a shared
context with readers (Hyland, 1999). ‘Normal science’ (Kuhn, 1970) produces public knowledge through cumulative growth;
research is intensively conducted in specific areas so that problems emerge sequentially from earlier problems. This allows
writers to rely on readers recovering the significance of the research without extensive referencing as they are often working
on the same problems and are familiar with the earlier work. In the humanities and social sciences, on the other hand,
research is less linear, the literature more dispersed and the readership more heterogeneous, so writers can't presuppose a
shared context to the same extent, but have to build one far more through citation. This also helps account for the much higher
proportion of self-citation in the sciences (12.5% compared with 4.3% in the humanities) as the linearity of research means that
scientists are constantly building on their previous work far more than writers in the soft knowledge fields.
The table also suggests how hedges and boosters index disciplinary authoring practices, with both occurring more
frequently in published papers in the arts and humanities. Hedges (e.g. possible, might, likely) function to withhold complete
commitment to a proposition. They not only protect writers from imprudent claims by implying that statements are based on
plausible reasoning rather than certain knowledge, but they also open a discursive space for readers to dispute interpretations
(Hyland, 1998). Authoring in the more discursive fields depends far more on recognising alternative voices as there is less
control of variables, more diversity of research outcomes, and fewer clear bases for accepting claims than in the sciences.
Writers can't assume that readers will share their interpretations and so express arguments more cautiously by using more
hedges. However, because methods and results are also more open to question, writers also use more boosters in some
circumstances to establish the significance of their work against alternative interpretations, using forms like definitely, prove
and certain to restrict alternative voices. But while hedges and boosters represent the writer's direct involvement in a text, the
positivist epistemologies of the hard sciences encourage writers to subordinate their individual authority to the authority of
the text. They therefore use fewer hedges and boosters to downplay their personal role and suggest that results would be the
same whoever conducted the research.
A major distinction between hard and soft knowledge areas is the extent to which succinctness and precision are valued,
or even possible, and this brings us to the last feature in Table 1: directives. These are devices such as imperatives and
obligation modals which instruct the reader to perform an action or to see things in a way determined by the writer (Hyland,
2002). They are not only more frequent in science texts, but also function differently. While 60% of directives in the soft
knowledge texts (excluding philosophy) direct readers to tables or references (e.g. see Smith, 1999, refer to table 2), those in the
sciences largely function to guide readers explicitly through an argument, emphasising what they should attend to and the
way they should understand it:

(4) What has to be recognized is that these issues … … (Mechanical Eng)

Consider the case where a very versatile milling machine of type M5 … (Electrical Eng)
A distinction must be made between cytogenetic and molecular resolution. (Biology)
As mentioned above, the linear, problem-oriented nature of the natural sciences enables research to occur within an
established framework of theoretical knowledge and routine practices which means writers can presuppose a certain amount
of background, argument, and technical lexis in their writing. This allows authors to report their experiments using a highly
standardised code and to frame arguments in familiar, almost shorthand, ways. Moreover, succinctness is highly prized by
information saturated scientists who tend to read for the bottom line, quickly scanning texts to recover results of novelty and
personal relevance in rapidly moving fields. Directives offer writers an economy of expression and allow them to cut quickly
to the heart of an argument. In contrast, knowledge-making in the humanities often needs to be accomplished with greater
elaboration, its more diverse components reconstructed for a less cohesive readership. While authoring in empirical fields
relies on encapsulating reasoning and getting the reader to ‘look’ in the right place to accept the veracity of the data, in the
humanities it means leading the reader along through the often complex chain of conditions and causal links. What amounts
to proximity for authors thus varies considerably.
This brief overview has suggested how the epistemological and social character of disciplines is both reflected and con-
structed through their rhetorical conventions. By taking Swales's perspective on genre as community situated actions seri-
ously, we can not only see how particular language choices help construct locally persuasive and valid arguments, but also
how they contribute to the reinforcement of group membership and disciplinary practices. Academic authors, in other words,
need to give some attention to their communities in their argumentative practices, using language to engage with colleagues
and code knowledge in accepted modes of argument.

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5. Genre and the construction of identities

Swales's admonishments to study genres as community practices not only encourages us to focus on disciplinary ways of
negotiating meaning, but also tells us something of how writers understand their communities e what they believe their
readers are likely to find convincing and persuasive. So these repeated rhetorical decisions don't just construct communities,
they also construct individuals.
Research on academic writing has long stressed the connection between writing and the creation of an author's identity
(Hyland, 2010; Ivanic, 1998). Identity is said to be created from the texts we engage in and the linguistic choices we make, thus
relocating it from hidden processes of cognition to its social construction in discourse. Issues of agency and conformity,
stability and change, remain controversial, however. Some writers question whether there is an unchanging self which loiters
behind such discourse and suggest that identity is a performance (e.g. Butler, 1990) while others see identity as the product of
dominant discourses tied to institutional practices (Foucault, 1972). Generally, though, contemporary perspectives see
identity as part of a social and collective endeavour created through participation in our social groups and the ways we are
linked to situations, to relationships, and to the rhetorical positions we adopt in our routine interactions with others.
So while identity may be a ‘performance’, and subject to change, it is a performance which is re-inscribed in us over time. It
involves taking on and shaping the discourses and practices of our communities to construct a self both distinctive from and
similar to those of its members. As I have argued, these individual and collective identifications are symbolised in genres, so
that speaking and writing in community-specific ways proclaims both individuality and membership of a group and a culture.
Identity thus involves proximity: it depends on identification with something as we draw on the disciplinary schema which
both shape and enable particular ‘speaking positions’ and disable others (Baynham, 2006). At the same time, these broad
templates for how we see and talk about the world are also the resources we need to present our own perspectives. Academic
reputations are based on saying something new, but doing so in ways that are familiar to those we are trying to convince. So
while proximity concerns how genre choices construct individuals as members, positioning is how these choices construct
members as individuals.
The community's collaborative practices do not just crush users into conformity but are also the options which allow
writers to engage in a community and perform an identity. In other words, identity is what makes us similar to and different
from each other and for academics it is how they both achieve credibility as insiders and reputations as individuals. We can
see something of this in three genres to which Swales did not turn his attention but where self-representation is most explicit:
the homepage, prize application and academic bio.

5.1. The academic homepage

Identity partly involves identification: identifying ourselves as belonging to a particular group by taking on its discourses,
genres and understandings, what I have called proximity. Creating an academic homepage thus involves presenting the self
by selecting materials likely to be valued by a particular group; it means making an identity claim. But there are tensions here
as identity has become a marketing tool for universities who frequently manage this genre in ways which promote the
institution at the expense of the individual. As Thoms and Thelwall (2005) observe:
The institution merely constructs academics in the model that is ideologically suited in order to promote the insti-
tution. Academics are thus denied any autonomous subjectivity construction, and yield to the constructed display items
in the university electronic window.
The individuality of academics is marginalised in the name of university branding, suppressing a multi-dimensional view
of the person to better showcase the university.
To regain some control over their representations, many academics create their own pages and to understand differences
in the claims being made for the individual subjects I compared differences in the two versions of this genre. This involved
examining a corpus of 100 homepages in philosophy and physics: 50 university hosted and 50 individual pages by the same
authors and taking equal numbers of full professors and Assistant Professors and of men and women from each discipline
(Hyland, 2012). I studied the visual design, hyperlinks, and textual representations e all of which are potential materials to
construct identity through proximity to community-valued practices and experiences while simultaneously using these
materials to position oneself as an individual player.
Visual representation is important in constructing identity in homepages and the most striking feature of the university
staff pages is their glossy uniformity. Design, format, colour and images are determined by the institution and duplicated for
every member in a department. This repetition imposes a university branding on academics. While located in different
disciplines, universities, and countries, for example, the pages in Figs. 1 and 2 have a similar grid structure and narrow colour
range. The pages are dominated by banner headings carrying institutional logos and department and university names, and
by sidebars with departmental information. These features act as symbols of ownership which remove agency and position
the individual as an employee. Following left to right reading conventions, for example, the text on the left is scanned first. It is
the ‘given’ of the text, providing the context in which we ‘read’ the author himself. The institutional context is therefore the
point of departure for the representation of the academic's identity.
Squeezed into the remaining space, subjects are presented through a brief paragraph, contact details, publication list, and a
photograph. The tightly cropped portrait minimises context and disconnects the subject from time and place. Depicting

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Fig. 1. A Harvard academic university homepage.

individuals in this way offers nothing to contradict an exclusively professional persona and reduces our ability to see the
individual as anything more than a generic academic filing a vacant place on the homepage. Repeated across an entire
department these features construct the subject as just one academic among many e subjugating individuality to the
institution (Hyland, 2013).
Hyperlinks are also important as they help construct identity by association. Who we publicly connect with says some-
thing about our interests, our communities and how we want to be seen. Through links to the pages of research groups, labs,
friends or other departments, authors can construct a ‘virtual community’ (Rheingold, 1995) and claim membership of
particular groups. Unsurprisingly, however, the university pages were dominated by institutional links with 31.8% to the
department, 12.9% to the university and 16% to courses and student matters. Almost two thirds of the 700 links connected to
institutional targets and just 11% to the individual subject.
Because of this, academics attempt to reclaim some control over their identity representations through personal pages.
Visually these are generally more homespun and individual. Stripped of university branding, logos, institutional advertising
and glossy homogeny, these ‘home-made’ pages generally adopt a more personal way of addressing readers. They are
altogether more idiosyncratic and distinctive, conveying integrity through minimalism and DIY design. One way authors
personalised their homepages is through more and more varied photographs, so there were 5 times more photos in the
personal pages and 80% of these were of children, partners, pets, landscapes and hobbies rather than the author, revealing the
writer as someone with a life outside university. In these pages the visual does not merely embellish text, but plays a central
role in presenting the self.
Links are also different on personal pages e contributing to a more individual identity by creating a network of personally
meaningful connections. When given a choice, authors reduced links to their university and department, which fell to 6.5%
and 5.3%, respectively, and increased them to their publications and disciplines. Links to publications shot up from 14.2% to
49% and most academics linked to their pdfs and reference lists, but disciplinary links are also far more important here, rising
from 4.8% to 10%, taking readers to labs, journal sites, professional associations, and so on. Thus authors used their personal
pages to showcase themselves as academics rather than their institutions.
Despite these differences, however, there were considerable resemblances in the ways authors described themselves with
over 80% of the pages mentioning jobs, research and publications and only 11 giving any personal information at all. Of the
800 links on personally constructed homepages just 88 (10.8%) referred readers to non-work pages, usually personal interest

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Fig. 2. University College London academic university homepage.

and hobby sites, another third, however, simply loaded a curriculum vitae which re-presented the writer's academic cre-
dentials. So while some used their personal page as a chance to present an academic-self more creatively, most remained
adamantly professional scholars. But while academics aren't obliged to post personal information, there is a marked absence
of any sense of authors' individuality. A homepage generates strong expectations of personal disclosure and the decision to
present only a professional suggests that the bland academic presented is all there is.

5.2. Identity in prize applications

An equally explicit identity claim is made when applying for prizes and awards. A graduate thesis prize, for example, often
entails a supporting statement from the applicant which requires writers to marshal, in a text of around 300 words, their
rhetorical and linguistic resources to persuade reviewers of the value of the research. My corpus of 70 statements supporting
applications for a doctoral prize in Education submitted over three years and containing just over 23,000 words, is typical of
the genre.
These graduate writers sought to take on the voice of competent academics by the skilful adoption of a disciplinary value
system, aligning with its shared concerns. The expression of value represents a clear signal of disciplinary identity, partic-
ularly proximity, by stressing novelty (5), contribution to the field (6) and clarity of argument (7), with the first two of these
occurring in every text:
(5) Part of its originality lies in the conceptualisation and organisation of a theoretical model that has not been pre-
sented before.
This thesis was groundbreaking in that it was the first study to look at the non-formal learning of novice teachers in
medical settings.
(6) It provides an original contribution to the study of educational accountability, understood in a comparative and
cross-cultural perspective, which is neglected in this field. It demonstrates the importance of the concepts of cultural
location and of cultural sensitivity.
My thesis will make a major contribution to global literature in the field of research methodology in general and Sri
Lankan literature in particular.
(7) It constructs, however, a clear and continuous argument through these multiple engagements.

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8 K. Hyland / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12

The work culminates in a strong argument regarding the directions developments in adult learning and educational
policy should take.
These doctoral graduates also pressed their claims to a competent academic identity by highlighting expertise in various
areas of research. One indication of an academic identity, for instance, is to suggest proximity through know-how in the
development of theory and innovative research methodologies, drawing on shared symbolic meanings to do so. The appli-
cants managed this with some assurance:
(8) As such, my study offers a sturdy theoretical framework and a clear methodological path through rich data.
I employed a modified version of the ‘circuit of culture’ e a theoretical model which holds that meanings are
distributed across a series of key moments from product production through to consumption. This original descriptive-
cum-analytical framework combines elements of content, discourse and social semiotic analysis.
The use of the first person here is clearly not a casual choice. It functions to display a professional competence by sug-
gesting that, in other hands, things could have been done differently. Similarly, their years of study in doctoral research have
enculturated these students into the discursive practices of their disciplines, enabling them to speak fluently using specialised
terminology and to discuss esoteric theories and celebrated theorists:
(9) This thesis works within Geographical and Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development
and Global Citizenship (ESDGC) to address matters pertinent to ‘philosophy of education’ (notably psychology,
comparative philosophy and postmodern and critical theorising).
A major theme is the theoretical development of Dowling's Social Activity Method.
The study is a multidimensional, multiscalar and holistic conceptual enquiry into the nature of ‘human-place’ relations
with a view to suggesting crucial dimensions of a ‘place-based education’.
The control of these disciplinary resources and knowledge of in-group terms, concepts and celebrities not only represent
specific understandings and a grasp of membership mechanisms, but allows their authors to construct a competent academic
self.
Writing like a disciplinary expert is, therefore, more than mastery of particular genres such as research articles or theses. It
is a process of disciplinary coming that involves control of an entire semiotic system of rhetorical resources and values. The
ways that these authors construct these texts is therefore also a way of constructing themselves; a gradual acquisition of the
resources necessary to stake a claim for membership and a sufficient grasp of them to carve an individual space for them-
selves. Prize applications therefore illustrate one of the ways that the concepts of proximity and positioning play out for those
new to a discipline, something we can also see in bios.

5.3. Identity in the academic bio

A key aspect of Genre Analysis is Swales's assumption that we organise our everyday behaviour through a repertoire of
genres, many of which are part of the routinised background of our professional lives. The academic bio is one of these
unregarded genres, but it is also an important site where experts and novices alike can position themselves in relation to their
discipline and colleagues. Here is an explicit opportunity to present a scholarly identity: drawing on disciplinary-valued
experiences and resources to shape a community-situated self. Juxtaposed with the prescribed anonymity of the article it-
self, which has been stripped of identifying information for blind peer review, this is a genre where, in 50e100 words, in-
dividuals stake a claim for a particular version of themselves and so indicate what writers see as important and valued by a
community. The study summarised here was conducted by Polly Tse and myself (Hyland and Tse, 2012) using a corpus of 600
bios, with 200 from leading journals in each of Applied Linguistics, Electrical Engineering, and Philosophy. We explored how
academics sought to construct their identities in this genre through what they say (moves) and how they say it (process
types).
Over half of all moves comprised references to employment and research interests. Rank and experience play a role in
what individuals have to say about themselves and we find an upward curve in the mention of research, employment,
publication and achievement in traversing the status cline. Senior scholars, in particular, were significantly more likely to
discuss both their research interests and publications while, in the absence of a publication record, students largely focused
on their educational background. They attempted to manufacture a credible disciplinary identity by highlighting their
attendance at a prestigious university, often together with their research interests:
(10) Hua Luan is currently a Ph.D. student in School of Information, Renmin University of China. Her research interests
include data warehousing, data mining, … (EE)
Helen Melander is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Education, Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests
are learning as an interactional achievement and cognition in a lived social and material world. (AL)
Gender seems relatively unimportant in identity construction in this genre, as men and women said similar things about
themselves, and discipline was the most significant influence on what authors included in their bios. The biggest disciplinary

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 K. Hyland / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12 9

difference was the weight engineers gave to education, where it was typically linked with the area of study, thereby
demonstrating a specific expertise and insider-competence:
(11) She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the French Aerospace Laboratory, in the Theoretical and
Applied Optics Department, Palaiseau, France (EE).
Irene Ntoutsi received her Ph.D. in Informatics from the Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Greece (EE).
This reflects a more apprenticeship-based system of research training in the hard sciences where novices enjoy oppor-
tunities to participate in research and publishing as part of a lab-based team while pursuing their studies. For many engineers
educational training is a significant aspect of their career profile and therefore tends to be given more attention in their bios.
Applied linguists, in contrast, give greater prominence to their research interests with this move comprising about a third
of all moves in their bios:
(12) Her research interests include analyzing student performance on large-scale writing assessments. (AL)
Jennifer deWinter's scholarship unpacks traditional and new media convergence within global markets. (AL)
This not only stakes a claim for academic credibility through familiarity with hot topics, but also aligns the writer with like-
minded individuals. Philosophers, on the other hand, highlight their publications, perhaps because the slow publication times
and preference for books may count for more when constructing a self than the experience of work in the frenetically paced
and multiply authored hard sciences.
Identity is expressed not only in terms of what we talk about but how we talk about it. One way of understanding identity
in this way is to focus on verbs, or process types. Here, Systemic Linguistics recognises a distinction between mental and
material processes:

mental processes e are verbs relating to sensing (think, believe, feel)

material processes e are concerned with doing (work, write, study)

A third form are relational processes and these express being.

Thus, acting on the world in some way (a material process) represents greater visibility than subjectively interpreting it
with mental processes. Overall, writers used relational and material processes in 95% of all clauses, stressing what they are
and what they do. Interestingly, relational forms increased with rank and material forms decreased with rank, suggesting,
perhaps, a shift from seeing our activities as something we do to something we are as we move through our careers.
Relational process types were predominantly what Halliday (1994: 119) calls intensive types, where a writer claims to be
something, such as an assistant professor or journal editor. These types made up two thirds of all relational processes. Once
again, rank influenced identity construction in this genre with senior academics twice as likely to select identifying over
attributive choices:
(13) Arnold Berleant is Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Long Island University. He is the author of six books that
elaborate a field theory of aesthetics (Phil)
She is the author or co-author of over 40 technical papers and is the holder of two patents. (EE)
These identifying options strengthen identity claims by uniquely identifying the writer and signalling that this is an
important part of who they see themselves to be. Students and non-non-professorial writers, on the other hand, over-
whelmingly selected attributive options, signalling class membership rather than a unique identity:
(14) Sampath is a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers. (EE)
She is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(AL)
Here writers make claims to be seen as one of many, so their status is part of a wider group and not an exclusive position or
distinctive aspect of their persona.
Discipline, however, was again the major influence on choices. Applied linguists, for example, were more likely to add a
more reflective and studious shade to their bios through mental processes:

(15) Her research explores prosody as an interactional resource … (AL)

He investigates writing skill in classroom and workplace settings … (AL)
This represents the writer as a thinking academic rather than as an intellectual worker grinding out a quota of papers.
Engineers, in contrast, used more verbal forms to present themselves as active discussers, but the greatest variations were in
the ways philosophers employed identifying relational clauses. Explicitly naming oneself as something is a significant aspect
of identity and philosophers did this twice as frequently as applied linguists and nearly four times more than engineers:
(16) Francisco Díez de Velasco is Professor of History of Religions in the University of La Laguna. (Phil)

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10 K. Hyland / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12

He has been President of the International Association for Aesthetics, Secretary Treasurer of the American Society for
Aesthetics, and … (Phil)
This option stresses a unique position for the writer and its prevalence in Philosophy may be due to the highly individ-
ualistic ethos of the discipline. Proximity here recognises that research practices stress interpretations and arguments as the
creative insights of the author rather than as the collective endeavours of a laboratory team and so offer a way of positioning
oneself in relation to colleagues.

6. Genre options, agency and positioning

I have stressed that identities are constructed out of the rhetorical options our communities make available, so we gain
credibility as members and approval for our performances as a result of our control of its discourses. We use these to achieve
proximity in relation to others and to position ourselves in relation to their ideas. In turn, we are ourselves positioned by these
same discourses. So there is a tension between using genre conventions to index membership and so claim similarity and
gaining a reputation by taking a different stand using a distinctive set of genre options. In this final section I will take this up
briefly by comparing the work of two well-known applied linguists, Debbie Cameron and John Swales, with a larger corpus of
work from the same genres to show how they construct very different identities e both from each other and the mainstream
(Hyland, 2010).
Deborah Cameron is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford. A socio-
linguist and radical feminist known most widely for her work on gender, globalisation and language, and discourse in the
workplace, she also has a recognisably confident and assertive style. One of the ways she conveys this is through her
significantly above average use of is e which is as the 5th most frequent keyword in the her corpus. It collocates most
frequently in her writing with it (370 times) and particularly in the form it is þ Adj. þ to infinitive (161 times):
(17) It is important to distinguish between the ideological representations of gender found in texts like conduct books
and the actual practice of real historical gendered subjects.
To answer these questions it is necessary to consider the influence of a number of vested interests
Thematic it introducing an embedded clause as subject helps to shift new or complex information towards the end of a
sentence, to the rheme, where it is easier for readers to process. It also, however, asserts the writer's opinion and recruits the
reader into it. But because it attempts explicitly to take control of readers' thinking, it is a potentially threatening strategy and
so carries a high risk of rejection. To pull it off, Cameron has to recognise a diversity of viewpoints and be prepared to engage
with these and she does this by writing the reader into the text, encouraging the addressee to share the conviction she has in
her views.
This assertiveness in Cameron's authorial positioning is also expressed through the co-occurrence of it with that (which
occurs 250 times). Hyland and Tse (2005) have called this ‘evaluative that’, a grammatical structure in which a complement
clause is embedded in a super-ordinate clause to project the writer's attitudes or ideas.
(18) … it is my opinion that the classifications used in the BNC are insufficiently delicate for this filter to be effective.
It is not my contention that top-down talk challenges CA's general account of how talk-in-interaction works.
If so, it is evident that inequality, rather than just difference, shapes the relationship of language to gender.
This is a powerful way of projecting ideas as it makes the writer's attitude the starting point of the message and the
perspective from which we interpret what follows it, leaving us in no doubt of her attitude.
Another way in which Cameron deploys disciplinary rhetorical resources to construct a distinctive identity is through the
use of rebuttal and counter-argument, with not (904 times), but (572), and though (144), all in her top 20 keywords. Thus
Cameron employs negation far more than is common in applied linguistics, using the discipline's resources to directly
challenging alternative positions. Once again this is a forceful and dialogistic means of taking a position by engaging with
others. This is a typical example:
(19) The idea that access to higher education should be widened, that degree courses should be for the many and not
just the few, has attained the status of received wisdom, and it is hard to dispute it without appearing snobbish,
reactionary or simply out of date. What lies behind it is not, however, a desire to democratise the ‘life of the mind’, but a
set of ideas about the changing nature of work.
Here Cameron seems to go along with the reasonable policies promoting wider access to university but then turns to
question the underlying assumptions of the argument, presenting her own position that ‘knowledge work’ is actually training
for the benefit of employers.
John Swales is an altogether different character. Known for his promotion of ESP and champion of genre in English lan-
guage teaching and research, Swales's rhetorical choices project an identity as a cautious and inquiring colleague rather than a
combative advocate and he positions himself in this way largely through genre choices which convey clear personal attitudes
and a strong interpersonal connection to readers.

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 K. Hyland / Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2015) 1e12 11

Frequent use of the first person is the most striking feature of Swales's discourse, with both I and my occurring in the top
ten keywords. Self-referential I, me and my, in fact, occur almost twice as often in the Swales corpus than in the applied
linguistics reference corpus, imparting a clear authorial presence and a strong sense of personal investment to his writing. We
see a writer making decisions, weighing evidence and drawing conclusions, as here:
(20) I believe that ESP practitioners find something very appealing in fashioning materials for tight circumstances.
I eventually abandoned my efforts to trace increasing lexical abstraction due to a lack of firm evidence.
In fact, first person in Swales work is mainly associated with mitigation and attitude. A concordance of the first person
shows how far agency is associated with modality, or at least a deliberative attitude in his writing. The most frequent main
verbs related to I are think (86), believe (71), suspect (35), hope (33), tried (31) and guess (29), all of which point to some degree
of tentativeness in handling claims and readers. This reflexivity contributes to an identifiable ‘voice’ and a key aspect of this
voice is the frequency with which self-mention is used in a self-deprecatory way:
(21) But I am very unsure whether I will ever use these particular materials again. As matters stand at the moment,
these materials have been, I believe, an educational failure.
Indeed, despite some trying, I have so far been unable to repeat my earlier success. Perhaps in the same way that
composers only seem able to write one violin concerto, discourse analysts can produce only one successful model.

7. Conclusions

In promoting the study of genres in EAP Swales propelled a generation of teachers and discourse analysts into an absorbing
enterprise, opening a window onto the ways individuals understand, sustain and change their communities and their pro-
fessional selves. ‘Genre Analysis’ offers tantalising glimpses of a world of academic genres, revealing some of the ways we
choose our words to connect with others and present ideas in ways that make most sense to them. By privileging certain ways
of making meanings, genres help to perpetuate the norms and thinking of disciplinary communities and so encourage the
performance of certain kinds of professional identities, but at the same time they also provide the boundaries within which
those identities are valued. They are how individuals not only present ideas in ways that are comprehensible and persuasive
to a target audience, but also convey the writer's personality, reliability and relationship to a message. The concepts of
proximity and positioning therefore seek to capture the essential dilemma involved in presenting a self: control of genre
conventions to index belonging and manipulation of those conventions to establish individuality. While not synonymous
with identity, these features perhaps provide the most immediate access to its rhetorical construction because they focus on
what individuals do to project themselves as credible academics within a shared professional context.
By encouraging us to see genres as community processes, rather than as artefacts of wider society, Swales opened up a way
of exploring the texts and identities that mean the most to community members. He showed us that genres are the ways we
relate independent beliefs to shared experience so that in studying them we are able to see how, through repeated choices
from a repertoire of options, people display themselves as the people they want to be. Put most simply, the view which Swales
first discussed in Genre Analysis provided the seed which allows us to understand the production of genres as both the
production of community and the production of self.

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Ken Hyland is Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He has taught
Applied Linguistics and EAP for over 35 years in Asia, Australasia and the UK and has published over 180 articles and 20 books on language education and
academic writing.

Please cite this article in press as: Hyland, K., Genre, discipline and identity, Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2015), http://
dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2015.02.005