Written Communication Apr 2021

Another Voice in the Room: Negotiating Authority in Multidisciplinary Writing Groups

Sara Wilder University of Maryland, College Park

Abstract

Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2021-04-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088320986540
Open Access
Closed
Topics
empirical research voice and style

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

  1. Carradini et al. (2026)
    Faculty and Administrator Perceptions of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Writin…
    Written Communication
  2. Vaughan et al. (2024)
    On the Page and Off the Page: Adolescents’ Collaborative Writing in an After-Sc…
    Written Communication
  3. Zhang et al. (2022)
    Responding to Supervisory Feedback: Mediated Positioning in Thesis Writing
    Written Communication
  4. Ortmann et al. (2022)
    Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English
    Research in the Teaching of English

Cites in this index (6)

  1. Durst (2019)
    Disciplinarity and Literate Activity in Civil and Environmental Engineering: A …
    Written Communication
  2. Brent (2017)
    Senior Students’ Perceptions of Entering a Research Community
    Written Communication
  3. Grobman (2009)
    The Student Scholar: (Re)Negotiating Authorship and Authority
    College Composition and Communication
  4. Artemeva (2008)
    Toward a Unified Social Theory of Genre Learning
    Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  5. Prior (1995)
    Tracing Authoritative and Internally Persuasive Discourses: A Case Study of Res…
    Research in the Teaching of English
Show all 6 →
  1. PRIOR (1994)
    Response, Revision, Disciplinarity
    Written Communication
Also cites 17 works outside this index ↓
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CrossRef global citation count: 5 View in citation network →

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