Variation in interpersonal relations in manuscript reviews with different recommendations

Highlights

• Author–reader relationship varies across reviews with different recommendations.

• Strong directives are more common in ‘major revision’ than ‘minor revision’ reviews.

• More use of 1st person pronoun mitigates recommendations in ‘minor revision’ reviews.

• Less use of 2nd person pronoun in reviews creates a collegial author–reader relation.

Abstract

Studies on author identity and relations in academic writing have mostly focused on research articles and relatively few studies have attended to the construction of identity in texts where there is a more obvious unequal relationship between author and reader. This paper reports on a study of interpersonal relationships constructed in an occluded genre, the manuscript review, and compares writer–reader relations across reviews with three different reviewer recommendations: ‘reject,’ ‘major revision,’ and ‘minor revision.’ An analysis of select lexicogrammatical features used in the construction of recommendations and the presence of author and reader in texts reveals the construction of a more unequal relationship between author and reader in ‘major revision’ and ‘reject’ reviews than in ‘minor revision’ reviews. This is due to the use of strong directives, the lack of author presence in mitigating negative evaluation and recommendations given, and the more direct reference to authors through the use of the second person pronoun, especially in negative comments. This study reveals that the polite and egalitarian relationship identified in public academic genres may not always be present in private academic genres and shows that author persona can vary in response to purpose, context, and readers of a genre.

Introduction

Numerous studies, especially in the last two decades, have shown that academic writing is not neutral and objective as it traditionally was thought to be (Hyland & Guinda, 2012). Instead, authors of academic texts convey their attitudes towards the propositions in texts as well as their relationships with their readers through use of rhetorical strategies, such as personal pronouns, epistemic modality, and directives (e.g. Hyland, 2002a, 2005, 2012b; Giltrow, 2005; Koutsantoni, 2006). Authorial voice or identity has been explored in numerous studies of academic discourse. In an overview article on identity in written discourse, Matsuda (2015, p. 145) described the writer's discursive identity as “created by the writer's choices and the textual manifestation of those choices.” He further states that a number of textual functions contribute to the construction of writer identity, including what applied linguists have discussed as stance, appraisal and evaluation, and that “identity is part of the interpersonal meaning that is negotiated through the interaction among the writer and the reader mediated by the text” (Matsuda, 2015, p. 145). In an overview of voice, Tardy (2012, p. 37) discusses author presence as one important element of author identity, pointing to the close connection of voice to Ivanič’s (1998) authorial self, which is the self the author projects in a text, by asserting his or her authoritativeness.

A large number of studies on author identity or voice and the interpersonal relationship writers construct with their readers have explored the use of discursive features, such as hedges and personal pronouns in academic texts (often via large corpora, as discussed below), and have pointed to evidence for variation in author identity and writer–reader relationship in academic texts from different genres and disciplines. A smaller set of studies have focused on reader response to author identity or voice in academic texts. Studies by Matsuda and Tardy (2007) and Tardy and Matsuda (2009) explored readers' construction of author identity in the activity of blind review of journal articles and the features attended to when readers construct authorial voice. A foregrounding of the dialogic nature of voice (Bakhtin, 1986) underpins a more recent study by Morton and Storch (2019) that explored readers' judgment of disoursal features that contributed to authorial voice. This study showed that a complex collection of features contributed to readers’ perception of voice and the highly contextual nature of voice.

The study reported in this paper explores the construction of author identity and interpersonal relationships with readers in an academic genre (rather than an understanding of readers’ construction or judgment of author identity) and, therefore, a more detailed discussion of studies on textual features of identity and author–reader relationship in academic genres is provided here. Research articles from different disciplines and different languages have been analyzed for variations in the construction of author identity or voice across different communities of practice. Hyland (2005, p. 187) states that “writers in different disciplines represent themselves, their work and their readers 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.” The interpersonal relationship constructed by academic writers can also vary because of audience differences as seen in the different values in proximity constructed in research articles and popularizations (Hyland, 2010).

Special attention has also been paid to the construction of author persona in review genres such as book reviews and grant proposal reviews (Koutsantoni, 2011; Moreno & Suárez, 2008). Book reviews, with an explicitly evaluative function, have high interpersonal implications for the reviewer and the author of the book being reviewed. Studies have identified variation in this interpersonal relation in the same genre produced in different cultural and linguistic contexts. In a study comparing the use of critical evaluative comments (both positive and negative) in book reviews written in Spanish and English, the greater presence of positive comments written by the Spanish reviewers and interview comments with the two groups of writers seemed to point to the greater importance for Castilian Spanish than Anglo-American reviewers for “establishing a harmonious encounter” between reviewer and author of the book (Moreno & Suárez, 2009, p. 175).

Another set of genres that have informed our understanding of author identity are what Hyland (2012a, p. 71) refers to as representational genres, which “involve the direct assertion of identity claims and have the self-conscious assertion of self as their primary purpose.” Included among such genres are academic web pages and bio statements that accompany research articles, which Hyland (2012a, p. 98) characterizes as “probably the most explicit public assertion of self-representation in scholarly life.” Analyses of bio statements have indicated the central role of disciplinary affiliation and the relatively smaller roles played by gender and seniority in the field in the construction of academic identity (Hyland & Tse, 2012).

The expression of authorial self has also been explored in student writing and compared to that in published academic writing. These comparisons have shown how different choices in the construction of stance can be traced to students’ neophyte roles in the academy and their perceived sense of lack of authority. In a study of the use of the first person pronoun, Hyland (2002a, p. 1109) states that the L2 students he studied see “self-reference as a marker of self-assurance and individuality which they did not feel when composing.” In another study comparing the use of hedges by graduate students in their theses and by published research article authors, Koutsantoni (2006, p. 33) points to student awareness of “power asymmetries between themselves and examiners, of their status in the community and of their status in the particular situation” as possible motivation for their greater use and choice of hedges.

Most of the work on the interpersonal relationship constructed in academic writing has focused on research articles, where the relationship has been shown to be more egalitarian than that in less prestigious academic genres such as the textbook (Kuhi & Behnam, 2011, p. 121). The dialogism in prestigious academic genres such as research articles is a manifestation of positive politeness and communality. Hyland (2001a, p. 565) describes this relationship as the “conventional fiction of democratic peer relationships diligently cultivated in published research writing.” However, it has also been pointed out that writers of research articles have to signal that they are “less powerful than the elite section of the academic community” (Kuhi & Behnam, 2011, p. 119). Studies of writing where the relationship between reader and writer is unequal have been mostly limited to student or disciplinary novice writing produced for more powerful readers, such as instructors or disciplinary gatekeepers (Koutsantoni, 2006), although a few have considered writer–reader relations in introductory textbooks (Kuhi & Behnam, 2011). Much less is known about the sort of interpersonal relationships constructed in occluded genres where the author is more powerful than the reader(s) of a text. One study which does explore interpersonal relations in occluded genres of unequal power is Chen and Hyon (2007), which focuses on the strategies employed to construct interpersonality in retention-promotion-and-tenure (RPT) reports written at an American university. They discuss a number of strategies used by authors (with power), such as humor and indirect speech acts, to mitigate the damage potentially caused to interpersonal relationships when authors comment negatively on the evaluatees’ performance.

Another occluded genre produced by gatekeepers in an academic community is the referee report or manuscript review. Manuscript reviews are produced by those who play an important gatekeeping role and, hence, are in a position of power in relation to the main addressee or recipient of the review (Englander & López-Bonilla, 2011, p. 396). Unlike the RPT reports analyzed in Chen and Hyon (2007) where the author, readers (gatekeepers from different levels of the university) and addressee (the candidate being reviewed) are identified, the manuscript review is covered by “a veil of anonymity” since the identities of the author and recipient, who is also the author of the manuscript being reviewed, are unknown in double-blind reviews (Bromwich, 2009, p. 353).¹ The social context in which this genre is produced is also unique as it has a limited audience: the author whose manuscript is being reviewed, the editor and, secondarily, the other reviewer(s) of the same manuscript.

A growing number of studies in recent years have explored manuscript reviews, discussing the presence of evaluation, speech acts, recommendations and requests in this genre as well as its overall organization (for example, Fortanet, 2008; Gosden, 2003; Hewings, 2004; Kourilova, 1998; Paltridge, 2013, 2017, 2019; Samraj, 2010, 2014, 2016). As discussed earlier, Matsuda and Tardy (2007) and Tardy and Matsuda (2009) have explored the construction of the identity of the manuscript author by review writers through their (the review writers') evaluation of a number of discursive and non-discursive features in the manuscript being reviewed. These studies explored the discursive (including content and formal features) and non-discursive features (for example, formatting) in the papers being reviewed that led reviewers to construct a particular identity of a paper's author. In sum, the goal of these studies was to explore the construction of author identity from the reader's (reviewer's) perspective. The focus of these two studies was not understanding the construction of the author–reader relationship by the review authors in the reviews produced. As such, an analysis of the interpersonal relation constructed by reviewers in occluded manuscript reviews can add to what is already known about writer–reader relationships in written academic genres.

Although some of the studies of manuscript reviews have considered features of these texts that contribute to the dialogic dimension of this genre, such as the use of direct and indirect speech acts (Paltridge, 2013, 2017), the primary focus of very few studies has been the construction of participant relationships in this genre. One such study (Englander & López-Bonilla, 2011), acknowledging the privileged and powerful position of reviewers, focused on five reviewer reports of two manuscripts written by non-native speakers of English to understand the reviewers’ interaction with the editor and author in the reviews, manifested through choices in syntactic structures such as the use of questions, directives, and personal pronouns. Analyses of these linguistic features led the authors to conclude that different reviewers in this case study construct for themselves the identities of Guardian, Ally, and Ringleader in their interactions with the authors of the two reviewed manuscripts. According to this study, the Ringmaster manages the performance of the reviewed author, points out the good in the text and directs the author to others in the discourse community for help. The Ally is the most helpful and engages with the author directly without showing any scorn for the author. The Guardian guards community standards and does not engage directly with the author through questions or directives and provides no help. Analysis of a larger number of manuscript reviews, not just limited to those reviewing manuscripts produced by non-native speakers, can help us further explore the sort of interpersonal relation created between author and reader in this occluded genre and add to what is already known about author identity and voice in public academic genres by both published authors and student writers.

The overarching purpose of this study is to understand the nature of the interpersonal relationship constructed in an occluded genre, where the author purportedly has greater power than the primary reader. Researchers have pointed to the manuscript reviewer's gatekeeping function (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019) while also referring to the review as a request for improvement, with a tutorial or directive function (Belcher, 2007; Bromwich, 2009; Fortanet, 2008; Giannoni, 2001). For a genre with a directive (or tutorial) function, an analysis of the construction of impositions made on the primary reader (whose manuscript is being evaluated) in terms of recommendations and directives is an important means to understand the nature of interpersonal relations created in it. In addition to an analysis of the recommendations and directives, features of authorial presence and references to the reader in the genre were also analyzed to understand the writer–reader relationship constructed (Hyland, 2001a, 2002a). Undoubtedly, a number of features could be analyzed in a study of writer–reader relationships ranging from the author's construction of his or her attitude towards the truth value of propositions to the type and extent of negative and positive evaluation in these reviews. Given the centrality of the purpose of recommending change to this genre, the focus in this paper will be the linguistic choices employed in constructing recommendations. In addition, the nature of author and reader presence in these texts will also be explored as references to the author and reader are key components for establishing the writer–reader relationship in this occluded genre.

Specifically, this paper compares the nature of interpersonal relationships in manuscript reviews with three different reviewer recommendations, ‘minor revision,’ ‘major revision,’ and ‘reject,’ produced for the journal English for Specific Purposes. To this end, linguistic features associated with the construction of recommendations (ranging from deontic modality to imperatives) were systematically analyzed to explore similarities and differences in the interpersonal relationship negotiated in reviews with different recommendations. In addition, the explicit presence of author and reader as important components in the relationships negotiated in this genre was also explored through an analysis of the use of the first and second person pronouns as well as third person author references (such as ‘the author’). Importantly, comparing sets of manuscript reviews with different reviewer recommendations such as ‘reject’ and ‘minor revision’ can indicate if manuscript reviewers construct different author identities and relationships with readers when reviewing manuscripts that they deem suitable for eventual publication, on the one hand, in comparison to those that they judge to be unpublishable, on the other. It might be expected that the interpersonal relation constructed would be different across these sets of reviews, especially between the reviews with the outcome of ‘reject,’ which position the primary reader and author of the evaluated manuscript as an outsider in response to the present bid to join the disciplinary community represented by the journal and those with the outcome of ‘minor revision,’ where the recipient is being acknowledged as a member or potential member of the disciplinary community, needing only to make some minor revisions to his, her or their manuscript before gaining membership.