Rhetoricla Choices in Facebook Discourse-Constructing Voice and Persona

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Computers and Composition 44 (2017) 3651
Rhetorical Choices in Facebook Discourse: Constructing Voice and

Persona
Ann N. Amicucci
Department of English, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, 1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway, Colorado Springs, CO 80918
Available online 31 March 2017
Abstract
This study addresses the need for attention to conflicts surrounding voice in composition studies in conjunction with recent
research demonstrating the rhetorically complex array of writing moves in which social network users participate. Together, these
areas of inquiry present a need for research into social network users rhetorical awareness of writing practices. The article presents
a study of one first-year college students Facebook activity. I analyze Facebook screenshots and interview data to describe the
participants construction of voice in writing and of a persona on the social network site. Findings reveal that the participant has
gained literacy in Facebook as a secondary Discourse as evidenced by her rhetorical awareness in Facebook activity. The participant
demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of rhetorical functions within Facebook by hiding her personal opinion, crafting a persona
characterized by non-mainstream interests, and paying attention to readers behavior to distribute content they found interesting
at times they were most likely to engage with it. I conclude the article by discussing applications for the first-year composition
classroom that can be drawn from the study findings and from students existing writing practices on social network sites.
2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Facebook; Secondary Discourse literacy; Voice; Persona; Qualitative research
A social network participant engages in an array of complex rhetorical moves to construct a persona aimed at
persuading others that he or she is a literate participant in a given digital context. On Facebook, cumulative rhetorical
choices made through status updates, photographs, linked content, and other methods of site engagement serve as
a participants attempts to demonstrate his or her position as an insider in Facebook Discourse (Gee, 2015). Such a
participant also makes choices in written text that forward a certain writing voice, one of many aspects of a social
network persona. This range of rhetorical activity on social network sites offers us rich material for teaching students
how to present themselves effectively in writing for academic purposes. Here, I use one college students construction
of a persona and writing voice on Facebook to illustrate valuable ways to teach students to gain awareness of and reflect
critically upon their construction of persona and voice in everyday writing practices and the ways they can transfer
these rhetorical constructions to academic writing.
In order to explore persona and voice within a social network context, we must first consider how these rhetorical
concepts have been framed within composition and rhetoric literature. Peter Elbows seminal work on the concept of
voice along with Roger D. Cherrys and Roz Ivanics explanations of persona offer ways for us to examine voice and
persona within the literacy activity of social networks. Peter Elbow (1994) has articulated five separate qualities of
voice in writing, one of which, the resonant voice or presence, we often conflate with authenticity or some sense of the
E-mail address: aamicucc@uccs.edu
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.03.006
8755-4615/ 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
A.N. Amicucci / Computers and Composition 44 (2017) 3651 37
writers real self. Elbow called this quality the swamp (p. 11), explaining that because of readers impulse to equate
a sense of a writer in a text with the writers actual self and, further, to make the faulty assumption that any individual
has an actual self to begin with, critics have disparaged scholarly discussions of voice as uncritical or uninformed.
Although studying voice is no longer popular in composition studies, Peter Elbow (2007) has argued that the subject is
still worth attention because teachers and students talk about voice often in regards to students development as writers.
Within Elbows definition of the concept, one voice quality warrants particular attention in the field of computers
and composition: the dramatic voice, what Elbow called the character or implied author in a text (1994, p. 1).
Dramatic voice is a feature of writing complicated by the complex discourse spaces of social network sites, where the
affordances of multimodal composing and the complexities of networked publics mean we find writers constructing
selves through both authored and replicated visual, spoken, and alphabetic text in the face of changing and unknowable
audiences (boyd, 2007). A writer/composer operating in a social network has a challenging task placed before him or
her: To be persuasive, he or she must construct a writing voice whose dramatic aspects suggest the exact character the
writer hopes to convey and also construct a persona enacting a role to present a certain version of him or herself to the
networked publics viewing the individuals composing activity.
Through the construction of a writing voice on a social network site, a writer informs his or her construction of a
persona in this digital context, and it is the writers dramatic voice in particular that contributes to the ways such a
persona is configured. Elbows concept of dramatic voice concerns the characteristics of a writer we discern through
textual features and aligns with Aristotles ethos, or a speakers construction of a character that enhances reception of an
argument by demonstrating the speakers good sense, good moral character, and goodwill toward audience members
(Aristotle, 2004; Elbow, 1994).1 While ethos and the concept of persona often bleed together into one discussion,
Roger D. Cherry (1988) distinguished between the two, arguing that persona and the literary tradition of analyzing its
construction concern the role(s) an author adopts in sending a particular message. Roz Ivanic (1998) furthered Cherrys
distinction by explaining that ethos concerns personal characteristics we associate with a writer based on the text, such
as being warm, loving, caring, sincere, reliable, astute, while persona concerns the role a writer creates for him or
herself in a text, such as student of philosophy, a Black activist, an apprentice social worker (p. 90). An authors
construction of a writing voice and a persona in a single, stand-alone text is complex rhetorical work to begin with.
This work becomes far more complex in the networked publics of sites such as Facebook (boyd, 2007). The fact that
many of us as scholars along with many of our students are engaged in social network literacies affords us a wealth of
resources in drawing on social network rhetorical practices to inform how we teach students to enact rhetorical moves
in the construction of voice and persona in academic writing.
In this article, I present a study of one first-year college students Facebook activity to demonstrate how such
social network practice represents literacy in a specific Discourse (Gee, 2015) and to illustrate the implications that
Facebook literacy holds for how we teach students to transfer rhetorical awareness from their non-academic digital
writing practices to the first-year composition classroom. Facebook activity produced by this student, JJ, highlights
the complexities at play in a writers construction of voice and persona on a social network site. In showcasing her
Facebook activity, I demonstrate how JJs awareness and purposeful construction of a Facebook persona is indicative of
her literacy in Facebook Discourse. I draw on Ivanics (1998) theory of identity in writing to analyze how JJ constructs a
discoursal self through Facebook writing and use James Paul Gees (2015) definition of literacy to analyze her mastery
of participation in the social network site as a secondary Discourse. Additionally, I outline the implications that JJs
Facebook use holds for the ways we teach students to construct themselves as writers within academic discourses. This
students use of Facebook and findings in related studies (Buck, 2012; McLean, 2010; Takayoshi, 2015; Yi & Hirvela,
2010) have shown us secondary and post-secondary students who are highly aware of the rhetorical choices they make
on social network sites. As Amber Buck argued, social network participation represents rich literate activity (p. 35),
and JJs is no exception. Her attention to persona on Facebook highlights the depth of her rhetorical awareness in this
context and can offer valuable guidance for the ways we teach students to reflect critically on their rhetorical abilities
in writing. JJs use of Facebook evidences her literacy in this communicative mode through her enactment of Facebook
1 In his discussion of the five qualities contained in a writers voice, Elbow (1994) argued that finely tuned dramatic voice alone cannot make a
text rhetorically successful. Just as Aristotle (2004) argued that a speakers construction of credibility is more likely to persuade successfully if the
speaker him or herself is in fact already an individual with good moral character, Elbow wrote that persuasiveness often comes from resonant voice
or communicated presence as often as it comes from merely dramatic voice or implied author. . . . If ethos is nothing but implied author, it loses all
power of persuasion (p. 18).
38 A.N. Amicucci / Computers and Composition 44 (2017) 3651
as a secondary Discourse, and such evidence of students social network literacies can shape how we teach rhetorical
concepts to first-year college writers.
1. Facebook as a secondary Discourse
By the very term social network, we are reminded that activity on Facebook and related sites is socially situated.
Users participation on social network sites, located within an ever-changing communicative landscape, comprises a
rhetorically and linguistically complex array of writing moves (Buck, 2012; Head, 2016; McLean, 2010; Shepherd,
2015; Takayoshi, 2015; Turkle, 2011; Yi & Hirvela, 2010). Seen through a New Literacies lens, the reading, writing,
and multimodal meaning-making activity users engage in on Facebook is shaped by ideological context: Each rhetorical
move must necessarily be seen within the web of social, historical, political, and material contexts that has shaped its
occurrence (Gee, 2015; Street, 2003). As a stalwart presence on the social network landscape for the past decade,2
Facebook proffers what Nick Bilton (2010) has called anchoring communities (p. 96), grouped connections that enable
users to wade through the glut of information available on the internet without being overwhelmed by it. What makes
the audience for Facebook communicative activity particularly complex is the fact that each user communicates with
an idiosyncratic audience on the site. Because Facebook allows users to determine the parameters of their connections
with others, it is highly unlikely for any users Facebook network to be comprised of exactly the same members and
sources of information as that of anothers. Each users network is personalized, and each user draws on a particular
combination of Facebook friends and pages to generate the information he or she receives (Bilton, 2010). In addition
to connecting with hundreds of friends, a user may have liked a few hundred pages for entities such as political parties,
local businesses, or television shows, and the information produced by these pages influences a users participation in
Facebook networks.
Along with constructing an individualized network through Facebook, users enact what Gee (2015) termed a
Discourse with a capital D by participating in that network (p. 171). Whereas discourse labels language use,
Discourse is a bigger package, what Gee called a conglomeration of saying(writing)doingbeingvaluingbelieving
(p. 171). Each of us enacts multiple Discourses in daily life, ranging from our ways of being/doing an identity at home
to being/doing identities in multiple public social contexts, and each Discourse we enact represents one of the many
identities we possess. Like Erving Goffmans (1959) argument that to perform a certain version of oneself successfully,
a person must embody the expected social behaviors and employ the expected props that accompany any given role,
Gee argued that for a person to enact a Discourse, he or she must not only say the right thing but also do the right
thing and in such saying and doing also express the right beliefs, values and attitudes (p. 168).
In Gees construct, individuals engage in a primary Discourse, a way of being and participating in ones first or
home environment, and multiple secondary Discourses, ways of enacting being/participation in other communities
beyond the home. Given the expansive nature of networked publics mediated by a social network site, we can consider
an individual users Facebook participation to be a type of secondary Discourse. The term Facebook Discourse labels a
users process of being and acting within his or her idiosyncratic Facebook communicative sphere and is a representation
of only one of the users multiple identities. All features of the users communication and all of his or her behaviors,
attitudes, and values in the network comprise the package that is the users Facebook Discourse. There is no correct
way to enact Facebook Discourse despite the fact that, as with any Discourse, some enactments are recognized by
participants as more correct than others.
When an individual comes to not only acquire but to learn a Discourse explicitly, the individual then has
the opportunity to secure literacy in that Discourse.3 Gee equated literacy with [m]astery of a secondary Dis-
course, explaining that building on ones acquisition by learning a Discourse allows one to develop meta-level
knowledge and be able to critique one Discourse with another (pp. 173, 174). An acquired Discourse is
one an individual can enact most naturally without having to think about how to perform its parts, while
2 Facebook was founded in 2004 and expanded beyond college and high school networks to general population usage in 2006. In 2016, Facebook
reported 1.71 billion monthly active users worldwide compared to Instagrams 500 million and Twitters 313 million (Stats [Facebook], 2016; Stats
[Instagram], 2016; Twitter Usage/Company Facts, 2016).
3 In using the terms acquisition and learning, I am drawing on the sociolinguistic distinction between acquiring a language or literacy through
everyday socialization, often at a young age and in a home environment, and learning a language or literacy by being taught its principles, whether
by a formal teacher or a peer (Gee, 2015; Krashen, 1982).
a learned Discourse is one the individual knows well enough explicitly that he or she can critically reflect
upon it. What is more, individuals who experience conflict between a Discourse and their prior literacy activ-
ity are often those who have the power to shape and change the practices of a Discourse (Gee, 2015; Ivanic,
1998).
Specifically within an academic context, Ivanic demonstrated the ability of students who had well-established
identities outside of the academy to challenge and work to change the dominant identity possibilities available to them
within it. She wrote that as individuals construct versions of themselves from among multiple possibilities for self-
hood, they do so in struggle with dominant ideologies but do not necessary capitulate to these dominant or expected
versions of the self (pp. 10, 13). Ivanic established four types of identity to describe the identity construction of writers
both in their actual writing and, abstractly, within the wider context of the writers world: A writers autobiographical
self contains identity parts affected by the writers past; a discoursal self names the identity impressions given through
writing; a self as author is the way a writer establishes authority or takes a stance on something; and Ivanics concept
of possibilities for self-hood describes all the identities available to a writer within the ideological contexts in which
he or she is writing.
Ivanic has connected identity to voice by arguing that to understand a writers identity and writing voice, we have
to talk with writers in addition to studying their texts. Much research on voice, however, is limited by its tendency to
only look at evidence of voice on the page rather than to couple this evidence with the writers perspectives on his
or her own voice. Recent research has explored voice from multiple angles, including analyzing voice in students
writing (Carbone & Orellana, 2010), charting the development of voice in teachers writing (Spalding, Wang, Lin, &
Hu, 2009), identifying ways that personal writing can facilitate students development of authoritative public writing
voices (Danielewicz, 2008), and using blogs as a vehicle for making tensions in voice study visible for student
writers (Tougaw, 2009). Such research operates within a social epistemic framework for composition studies and
acknowledges the multiple contextual factors that influence a writers construction of a self on the page yet does
not involve study of writers perspectives on their own voice construction. Ivanic has advocated for research that
involves attention to both textual evidence and writers perspectives, arguing that perhaps the most effective research
on voice is that which addresses how voice in writing is constructed by and constructed in response to ideological
context.4
Ivanic equated the writers owned voice with his or her individual stamp evident in writing, explaining
that this voice demonstrates evidence of the writers choices, from among many competing socially available dis-
courses, of ones s/he is willing to be identified with (p. 55). Among the multiple factors that shape a writers
development of the individualized voice evident in his or her discoursal self, including the writers past and the
writers stance on a subject, the writers perception of his or her audiences expectations plays a significant role in
that a writers anticipation of known or imagined reader(s) has a direct effect on how the writer consciously or
unconsciously constructs a self on the page (p. 215).5 Ivanic explained that dominant ideologies are filtered through
readers, and the values that a writer actually witnesses or imagines readers to holdvalues that often uphold these
dominant ideologiesare what shape the writers construction of a discoursal self on the page. Writers may or
may not be conscious of their process of choosing from among multiple possibilities for self-hood to construct an
identity on the page (Ivanic, 1998). In Gees terms, the ability to critique such choices not only in writing but in
Discourse participation broadly is indicative of being literate in the secondary Discourse an individual is enact-
ing. Facebook literacy, then, requires a user to have learned Facebook Discourse and to be able to critique his or
her participation in it. Because construction of an identity in writing is one facet of the users participation in this
Discourse, literacy in the Discourse necessarily comprises a writers ability to critique his or her writing identity
construction.
4 See Ivanic (1998) for a discussion of work by sociolinguists Norman Fairclough and James V. Wertsch that analyzes language while also focusing
on writers and their identities.
5 Ivanics discussion of the ways a writer constructs a voice in response to perceived reader expectations resembles the notion of an imagined
(Ong, 1975) or invoked (Ede & Lunsford, 1984) audience that writers construct in composing print-based prose. Similarly, writers on social network
sites face the challenge of imagining many different types of readers folded together into one mass audience (Marwick & boyd, 2011). Though some
readers in a social network audience are known entities to the writer, social network writers cannot ever fully know their digital audiences because
content created online is able to be accessed in perpetuity and replicated indefinitely in its original form (boyd, 2007; Marwick & boyd, 2011).
2. Methods of data collection and analysis
This study showcases the Facebook activity of a first-year college student, JJ, who was a participant in a larger study
of college students writing practices and rhetorical awareness on Facebook conducted at a public, mid-sized, Western
university. All steps of data collection were approved by the Institutional Review Board at the study site. The purpose
of this study was to describe how students write on Facebook and to determine the extent to which they demonstrate
an awareness of the rhetorical situation(s) at play in such writing. The study sought to answer the following research
questions:
1. How do first-year college students describe their construction of a persona within their writing on Facebook?
2. How do these students describe their attention to audience in their writing on Facebook?
In conducting interviews with participants, I respond in this study to calls for more student voices in digital literacies
research (Alvermann, 2008; Kirtley, 2005). Additionally, in combining the collection of interview data with data from
Facebook, I follow Amber Bucks (2012) precedent of having a participant describe his or her social network activity
while showing specific examples of that activity to the researcher rather than describing such activity in the abstract.
In the larger study, I collected data from three participants; my data analysis revealed that JJs attention to her own
construction of a persona and to audience far exceeded in its sophistication that of the other participants and warranted
exploration as the single-participant case study presented here.
2.1. Data collection procedures
At the start of our interview, I asked JJ to log into Facebook on my computer and then complete a demographic
questionnaire in hard copy, on which she chose the pseudonym JJ for herself. While JJ completed the questionnaire,
I prepared her Facebook page for a screen capture by uncollapsing material on her timeline and clicking to view all
comments on posts where some were hidden. I collected an image of activity on the timeline using an automatically
scrolling screen capture application for Google Chrome (Coles, 2015). I then interviewed JJ following a semi-structured
protocol focusing on how she used Facebook and her attention to audience and persona on the site. During our
conversation, JJ remained logged into Facebook, and we took turns navigating the timeline and referring to specific
activity on the screen in connection to our discussion. At the conclusion of our interview, I debriefed JJ by explaining
that while she would remain anonymous in the study write-up, any activity on her Facebook page that was public could
lead to her identity becoming known, and we discussed her privacy settings on the site. Next, I showed her the screen
capture, scrolled through the entire captured image, and gave her the opportunity to redact any activity on her timeline.
She chose not to redact anything from the collected data.
Following the interview, I transcribed the audio recording and then transcribed the screen capture by tallying total
posts, comments, and likes, transcribing all text, and writing descriptions of photographs and linked content. In doing
so, I replaced identifiable information with equivalent details to protect JJs identity.6 I drew on grounded theory in
analyzing data to conduct qualitative analysis of the screen capture and interview transcripts by identifying themes that
emerged in JJs use of Facebook and in her rhetorical awareness for that use (Hood, 2007; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). I
engaged in multiple recursive readings of transcripts from the screen capture and interview to develop a coding scheme
for each.
In coding activity on JJs timeline, I identified themes that emerged in both the content of text-only status updates and
the content of shared and linked items. Text-only updates clustered around three themes: poking fun at or expressing
surprise at others behavior, sharing an epigrammatic status or a quote from someone else, and sharing popular culture
commentary. Popular culture also emerged as a common theme among shared and linked items; other themes here were
items containing historical information, items discussing personality traits, and listicles, or digital articles structured
as lists. In analyzing the interview transcript, I coded JJs discussion for attention to persona and attention to audience.
6 I did not replaced details about the Columbine school shooting and a building named Columbine Hall in the participants Facebook statuses,
given the rich local significance of these details. Because Columbine Hall is a building known to many students, including this detail does not make
JJ identifiable within the study.
Within her attention to persona, no additional themes emerged, but I gathered a description of her persona that I could
compare to the way that persona, and her voice as a writer in particular, was characterized through Facebook activity.
Within JJs attention to audience, two themes emerged: anticipating the specific responses of an audience and making
audience-driven rhetorical choices.
2.2. Limitations of methods
In scanning JJs timeline before the screen capture, I missed two posts that had collapsed comments and, as a result,
was unable to fully analyze this comment data. This limitation arose from my desire to scan the timeline quickly and
finish the screen capture by the time JJ completed her questionnaire. Additionally, because screen capture images are
static, I could not interact with the timeline in analyzing content as one would on a social networking site. For example,
I could see the date and time of recent posts but only the date of some older posts, whereas hovering over a post on a
live timeline would provide more information.
These limitations in data collection were minimal and did not affect my ability to analyze JJs writing on and
rhetorical awareness within Facebook. However, they highlight challenges faced by digital literacies researchers in
designing studies that ethically and credibly allow us to gather data on social network use. As Pamela Takayoshi
(2016) has argued, any study that collects evidence of social network activity necessitates careful attention to study
design in acquiring consent to gather communicative activity as data. For example, though the activity on JJs timeline
contained communication by and photographs of others, I made only minimal descriptive notes about the nature of
this content and its intersections with JJs activity because I did not have contact with nor obtain consent from these
other individuals. This distinction between activity on the timeline that was and was not collected as data complicated
the analysis process, as it limited the picture I could present of JJs communicative interactions with others. As digital
literacies research expands into further studies of social network activity, researchers must consider similar ways to
delineate boundaries of consent while designing methods to collect evidence of communicative activity that do not
place undue burden on participants in terms of their time commitment or the access they provide to their social network
participation.
3. Findings: A writers voice and persona construction on Facebook
JJ, a 19-year-old philosophy major in her first semester of college, said she uses Facebook daily. I like being
kept up to date, she told me. This is like my newspaper. I always check it every morning. Not only is Facebook
JJs source for information about her 1,000-plus Facebook friends activities and about the world, it is also a space
where she cultivates a stream of information for friends by sending articles their way almost daily that range from pop
culture throwbacks to listicles like 24 Pictures That Perfectly Sum Up Going To College. The screen capture of JJs
Facebook page recorded activity from mid-March 2015 to our conversation near the end of April 2015. Aside from
44 posts that JJs friends wrote on her timeline for her birthday, 41 items appeared on the screen capture during this
five-week period. Among these 41 items, one was written by a friend, another was JJs updated profile photo, and the
remaining 39 contained content written or shared by JJ; among these remaining 39, 24 featured linked content such
as an article, video, or meme, 14 were text-only status updates, and 1 was a selfie. The frequency of JJs posting was
inconsistent: In numerous instances, she posted twice or more on the same day, and at other times, she didnt post
anything for three or four days in a row. JJ identified morning as her prime time for reading Facebook and afternoon
as her preferred time for posting to it, though on days when she posted multiple items, her posts occurred at multiple
times spread throughout the day.
JJs writerly voice, or the sense of a personal presence in her writing, was largely hidden, while her persona, or the
rhetorically crafted character she portrayed through a combination of all Facebook activity, was far more visible in her
activity on the site. JJ described choices to avoid overly personal or opinionated posts, which led to her voice as a writer
being obscured in many posts and also informed the way she constructed a Facebook persona. In turn, the persona she
constructed on Facebook was directly related to her attention to audience, evidenced in JJs desire to forward content
to peers in ways that shaped the perception they held of her.
3.1. Opinions are out, epigrams are in
In our interview, JJ professed that she chooses not to reveal anything too personal on Facebook, and screenshots
of her activity supported this assertion. Among 14 text-only status updates, only 4 evidenced some sense of a faceted
individual speaking behind the written words. In two of these updates, where JJs voice was most present, she wrote in
a tongue-in-cheek manner, expressing surprise at others actions in specific scenarios. In one, she wrote, My brothers
girlfriend today: See all those lights in the sky? Those are airplanes coming in to land. Youre kidding [Unimpressed
Emoji].7 JJs commentary of Youre kidding coupled with the emoji expressing dismay indicated that she was
surprised at, and perhaps even making fun of, the speakers statement. Her brief, emoji-enhanced commentary served
as one of the only examples where her voice as a writer was evident in her posts. In a status update written in a similar
something I overheard vein, JJ wrote the following:
Two of the most disappointing things I heard today:
1) A Colorado native saying they didnt know Columbine was in Colorado until a few years ago
2) Someone saying it was weird the Columbine Hall building on the UCCS campus was named after the TOWN that
was shot up. The TOWN. Ugh.
Here, too, JJ has expressed disbelief at other peoples statements, statements that in this case related to a building on
campus and the origin of its name. My conversation with JJ indicated that for her, the latter of these two mistakes, which
she called stupid, was doubly insulting. The building was constructed and named prior to the 1999 Columbine school
shooting, the event the word Columbine now evokes for many out-of-staters as well as many Colorado residents.
What was even more problematic for JJ, though, was that the name Columbine in connection with the school shooting
refers to the name of the high school in question, not to the town of Littleton, CO, where the school is located.
The formats of the brothers girlfriend and Columbine statuses are similar, in that JJ has relayed something said by
others and offered minimal but biting commentary on the foolishness of speakers whose words she had recreated. In
the latter status, her commentary included labeling the statements disappointing and ending the post with Ugh to
express her distaste for individuals lack of knowledge on the subject of Columbine. Though minimal, this commentary
and that of Youre kidding in the previous status exposed JJs writerly voice as one characterized by valuing reason
while expressing a fair degree of snark. She spoke from an educated perspective, surprised that the people she interacts
with know so little on the subjects they discuss, yet her use of an emoji and the word Ugh added a degree of expressed
disgust to these posts, showing JJ as someone who was poking fun at the speakers and prompting her readers to do the
same.
In the majority of JJs posts, this voice that has biting opinions on others actions was absent. A few status updates
offered brief popular culture commentary such as New favorite movie: Savages [Heart Eyes Emoji] or When youre
on the last episode of Friends [Sad Emoji] Gonna have to restart it. Such statuses provided insight into JJs preferences:
She enjoyed Savages, a crime thriller focused on California marijuana dealers, and Friends, a television sitcom about a
group of twenty-somethings living in New York. Neither status update revealed what she thought of Savages or Friends
beyond the fact that she liked them.
Other status updates similarly indicated JJs likes and dislikes without offering reasons for these preferences. One
read simply, I love college. Another asked, Does anyone else hate when the term on fleek or low key is used? The
status I love college received 13 likes and no comments, but the question about terms garnered more of a response:
25 likes and 7 comments in which JJs friends reiterated her annoyance. Once jokingly used the phrase low key in his
response, and another asked what the words meant, but no one explained. JJ chimed in with 3 comments on this post,
bolstering others opinions and her own, saying Right to echo friends sentiments that these words are undesirable,
and, when one person said she thought she was alone in this feeling, saying, You are certainly not [Smiling Emoji].
Save for the Facebook friend unaware of the words meanings, everyone commenting on the post agreed with JJ, yet
no one, JJ included, explained why they held these opinions.
7 The Unimpressed Emoji face shows a downturned mouth and narrowed eyes looking sideways. Names from http://emojipedia.org/ are used to
describe emoji in JJs Facebook activity.

In other instances, JJ posted epigrammatic status updates that further masked her voice because they contained no
original content. Such updates forwarded a perspective without JJ having to state the perspective in her own words. In
the following four examples, JJ drew on others words to share an idea:
Dreams unwind
Loves a state of mind.
Fleetwood Mac
You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how. Rhett Butler
Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you arent.
In the first two of these statuses, JJ attributed posts to their original sources: in one case, lyrics from Fleetwood
Macs Rhiannon, and in the other, a line Rhett Butler says to Scarlett OHara in the film version of Gone with the
Wind. In the third status, she used quotation marks to signal that the words were not hers, while in the fourth, she did
not use quotation marks. In neither of these latter cases did she attribute content to the authors commonly affiliated
with these passages, Khalil Gibran and Margaret Thatcher, respectively. JJs rhetorical moves in this regard further
veiled her voice as a writer. In such updates, JJ aligned herself with certain concepts but, as a reader, I do not hear her
giving us any particular opinion on these concepts.
In JJs epigrammatic status updates and those about Savages and Friends, she did not substantiate her opinions by
providing the reasons behind her preferences. The extent of JJs opinion was to like or dislike something: College is
good, on fleek is bad, and passing along a perspective via a quote cribbed from someone else is sufficient. In these
instances of unsubstantiated opinion, her voice as a writer was only minimally evident because she did not indicate
to readers why she thought certain things, only that she thought them. In the status updates written in her own words,
JJ perpetuated the Facebook mechanism of liking through the content of her posts. Her updates enacted the same
rhetorical move as pressing the like button, which allows a user to show support for an idea or align him or herself
with a position without having to provide any reasons for that choice. In the status updates written in someone elses
words, her voice was further hidden, with others words standing in for her own.
In conversation with JJ, I learned that the lack of personal opinions on her timeline was intentional. She explained
that keeping her page largely free of overly personal expression was a choice she came to make over time. Referring to
the Savages post, for example, JJ said, I dont post stuff like this a lot but it was a really good movie. When I asked
her to elaborate, she said she doesnt post things that are personal . . . like my opinion. She said that in her younger
years as a Facebook user, she shared personal details more often: I would post stupid stuff . . . or my personal thoughts
of something that happened to me. . . . freshman year, like Mahhh, Cant believe Steven broke up with me. Its so sad.
What was different for JJ as a younger user was that, she said, I thought people would care. Which was stupid. In
JJs experience, people didnt care. And, likewise, she doesnt care now: She said that if a friend gets married or has
a baby, she is excited to hear the announcement but not to read the details. She recounted the story of a friend who
recently had a baby and posted every detail, including specifics of the labor process. JJ said she didnt want to see this,
calling it really annoying and arguing that a picture of the new baby once every month would be plenty.
3.2. Performing a non-mainstream Facebook self
Despite the absence of a writerly voice from many of her status updates, JJ described a distinct persona she had
crafted on Facebook and attested to having purposefully constructed it. The version of herself JJ said she wanted
to forward on Facebook was that of a person who is not mainstreamwho has access to and enjoys forms of
entertainment and sources of information not typically sought out by her peers. She explained:
[A]ll the music that I post, its not mainstream. Um, usually older music like Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra,
Led Zeppelin, things like that, cause I dont want people to think that Im like everyone else. So. And I want to
post things that not a lot of people see.
JJ said she would occasionally post something more popular. She cited the video Mime Through Time by the
group SketchShe, which shows three women in car lip syncing to popular songs from several decades. JJ liked the
video so much that she had to share it, despite the fact that the video was pretty common . . . I usually dont like to
post things like that. JJ posted this video to Facebook only a day after it was first published on YouTube, but she had
seen it shared enough to categorize it as something mainstream she would normally try to avoid.
In most cases, JJ said she sought out and shared things her Facebook friends would not encounter otherwise. She
pointed to two examples to illustrate this non-mainstream quality: a photo of concentration camp prisoners with a
caption describing the numbers of Holocaust victims and an article about veterans who live with Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder. JJ said she would often pull content to share from the pages she followed; two she cited were Opposing
Views, which calls itself a place for controversial news, tough issues and passionate debate, and Right Wing News,
a page run by conservative journalist John Hawkins (Opposing Views, n.d.; Right Wing News, 2015). The Opposing
Views page, JJ said, will post really controversial articles and theyre always actually kind of sad but I really like
them. She said she followed other pages to learn new things and learn about new places.
Taken as a whole, JJs Facebook persona was complex, and there was some variance between how she defined her
avoidance of mainstream content and the actual presence of such content on her Facebook timeline. In my analysis of
JJs timeline, I am relying on her definition of the term mainstream, which, as noted previously, she defined as activity
showcasing information or references commonly shared by others or material representing majority preferences of her
peers. JJ was adamant about not wanting to be mainstream, citing as rare those occasions when she would post things
that were more common. Yet a notable amount of the content that appeared on her page aligned with mainstream
pop culture: Posts appeared that referenced Disney characters, the movie Frozen, and Nike athletics, and though JJ
wrote the post referenced earlier that lamented zeitgeist phrases like on fleek and low key, she also linked a video
with the recently popular term bae in its title and herself captioned a meme about the differences between men and
women with the phrase On point. While the screen capture did show evidence of the type of non-mainstream activity
JJ referenced beyond the examples she cited in our conversation, such activity was tempered by an equal presence
of other posts referencing arguably mainstream topics. These slips into more mainstream popular culture colored the
persona JJ said she projected on the site.
My analysis of the content of JJs Facebook activity revealed a persona characterized less by being non-mainstream
and more by being well-informed. JJs persona, in my view, was an amalgam of current, rather mainstream popular
culture references and informed, contemplative news content. The result was an image of a college girl who is fun
and friendlythough the timeline did not offer any specific details to inform that generic upbeat veneerand who is
also well-informed and eager to pass along information on important issues. Take the following slice of JJs Facebook
timeline, for example. In a two-day period, she posted the following8 :
Day 1 at 12 a.m.: A text-based graphic, the image JJ has captioned On point, shows a Bluetooth symbol in
blue and a Wi-Fi symbol in pink. The graphic reads, Most men are like Bluetooth; he is connected to you when
you are nearby, but searches for other devices when you are away. . .Women are like Wi-Fi; she sees all available
devices but connects to the strongest one.
Day 1 at 8 a.m.: An article from Rolling Stone titled Ringo Nailed It: Paul McCartney Inducts Starr Into Rock
Hall of Fame that JJ has captioned with a heart emoji.
Day 2 at 1 a.m.: An article from Elite Daily titled 15 Years Later: How We All Are Columbine. JJ captioned
this piece with a heart emoji as well.
Day 2 at 3 p.m.: The text-only status update I love college
Day 2 at 9 p.m.: The text-only status update quoted previously in full that starts Two of the most disappointing
things I heard today. . . and cites others lack of knowledge about the Columbine school shooting.
The variance in JJs Facebook persona is evident in her weaving together, in a period of 48 hours, news content
about the Rock Hall of Fame and Columbine, a reference to her college experience, and a tongue-in-cheek remark on
gender differences. In this slice of activity, her affect variedshe moved from calling a humorous depiction of mens
and womens differences On point to sharing a serious piece on a school shooting to expressing snarky dismay at
8 Times are rounded to the nearest hour to protect the participants anonymity.
what her peers didnt know about that event. At some times, her Facebook content was light-hearted, and at others, it
was quite serious, yet at no point was it uninformed.
3.3. Adapting to audience behavior
Within JJs concern for who she was on Facebook and how she came across on the site lay a significant level
of attention to how her audience used the site and received the content she shared. This attention to audience was
sophisticated and shaped how she used Facebook, affecting what and when she posted. JJ said that her goal in posting
was visibility: I just hope people will see it, she said, adding, I just really want people to [look through] and enjoy
as much as I do cause . . . if I share something, [I] really want someone else to watch it because it was really good. JJ
said she avoided posting things that I dont think would make a difference or have a lot of an impact on someones day
. . . cause I find that people really wouldnt care that much. She added, Our attention spans are just so short, so if they
dont see something thats funny or biting or catchy its like [keep scrolling] cause thats what I do. JJ used her own
behavior on Facebook to make decisions about how her audience would react to what she shared; she had reflected on
her tendency to scroll through the news feed without reading everything and used this reflection to inform her choices
of what to post. If a post did not catch readers attention, she explained, they would scroll past, which meant the item
was not worth posting in the first place.
JJs attention to audience extended beyond simply posting things that were attention-worthy, however. She also
used her audiences behavior and her own on the site to determine how to channel that select information to readers
effectively. To start with, she didnt post too often:
I feel like its kind of a rule if youre going to post a lot, use Twitter. If youre not going to post a lot, use Facebook
because if you post a lot on Facebook, people are gonna give you a lot of crap about it.
She went on to say that the point of Twitter is to post frequently, so Twitter users who do so receive little flak. However,
Facebook, for JJ, comprised an audience with limits, and if she exceeded those limits, she forfeited the audiences
attention. Though JJ said she posted something probably every two days, she added that she sometimes exceeded
this limit if an article or video she encountered was too good not to share. She explained:
[I]f I find a lot of things that I like . . . I dont like to post two things in a row cause I know that the odds of people
liking two things in a row are pretty slim. They probably wont like them a lot. But if I really like em, Im
like, Oh, Im going to have to share this with people.
JJs explanation showed the negotiation she entered into when she came across something post-worthy. Hers was not
a simple decision to post every item she found that was funny or biting or catchy. Rather, she considered multiple
factors, including whether the item in question was too common or mainstream and whether she had posted
recently.
Thus, a second motive beyond visibility inspired what JJ posted. She wanted readers to engage with the content
she sharedto actually read articles or view videosbut she also wanted readers to like this content in the Facebook
sense. Along with JJs determination that an effective pace of sharing content involved posting something every other
day, she had determined that there were particular times of day when readers were most likely to pay attention. When
she found something worth sharing, in addition to considering how recently she had posted, she considered the current
time. She elaborated by explaining:
[T]he time of day really matters cause if its in the afternoon more people are probably going to read it cause not
a lot of people are going to be up in the morning and not a lot of people stay up really late. I do, but not a lot
of people do. So the best time to post is usually in the afternoon, when most people are going to see it, [when it
will get the] most likes.
Though the Facebook feed gives users the option to scroll through all content regardless of when it was posted, JJ
indicated that in order to garner the most attention, she had to post things while readers were actually on the site. The
afternoon was her critical window, the time she identified when most of her friends would be present, when the most
people are going to see what she shared. JJ said she even read the mood of her Facebook audience to determine what
to share. When posting, she explained, [Im] just kind of thinking [about] the common themes that Ive seen lately,
like if everyones in a crappy mood, Ill probably post something on that or if everyones in a positive mood, Ill post
something uplifting.
JJs discussion of Facebook activity revealed guidelines she had in mind for Facebook use, including the fact that
she preferred not to post twice in a row or to post at early morning or late night times. Though my analysis revealed
that JJ often posted more than once in a day, multiple posts in these cases were typically spread out throughout the
day. JJ rarely posted during morning hours, though she posted a number of times after midnight, despite her profession
that she avoided late-night posts because not many people were awake. There was no indication that posting multiple
times on the same date resulted in second and subsequent posts receiving fewer likes than earlier ones, as JJ feared.
Rather, in more cases than not, subsequent posts received more likes than first posts on a given date.9
4. Discussion: Evidence of secondary Discourse participation and Facebook literacy
JJs decision to avoid overly personal posts demonstrates her process of gaining literacy in Facebook Discourse.
Unlike in a classroom, where writing conventions are made explicit, the world of JJs Facebook activity has not come
with any sort of teacher or guidelines, yet she has determined how to interact with and participate in this Discourse
in ways she deems successful. When she first started using the sitein those years when she would post what she
called stupid stuff like a status lamenting the end of a relationshipher attempts at enacting Facebook Discourse
fell short because she wrote things that people didnt seem to care about. Participating in a Discourse is a matter of
both enactment and recognition, a two-part negotiation where not only does an individual need to act in certain ways
and do certain things, but those actions and enactments need to be recognized and accepted by insiders as appropriate
ways to perform a certain identity (Gee, 2015, p. 173). JJ didnt get the reaction she hoped for in her high school years
because she wasnt doing Facebook in a way that was socially accepted. When she recalled her typical status updates
as a high school freshman, she laughed and directed the question [W]hy would you write that? to her past self. Those
past statuses presumably did not seem silly at the time, but JJs retrospective take indicates that they were misaligned
with what she later came to perceive as acceptable enactment of Facebook Discourse.
JJs current stance toward her past Facebook practices comes from having learned and then appropriated successful
rhetorical moves within her Facebook Discourse, a process from which her literacy in this Discourse emerges. It is
specifically because JJs previous way of using Facebook was not accepted that she came to be able to critique her
participation over time. JJ has shaped her current method of operating in the Facebook sphere through reflection on her
own past use and others uses, experiences that [have] trigger[ed] conscious reflection and prompted learning of the
Discourse (Gee, 2015, p. 167). In effect, as JJ was acquiring knowledge about how to enact Facebook Discourse, she
did not readily acquire knowledge of effective participation, making her, initially, a user with a somewhat marginalized
identity, and that very marginalization enabled her to gain the ability to critique her construction of an identity within
Facebook in years to follow (Gee, 2015; Ivanic, 1998). Her rejected participation attempts fueled a self-motivated
learning process: JJ experimented with communication on the site while observing what methods of communication
were received favorably by her friends, which moved her from an acquisition to a learning phase that resulted in her
explicitly learning tenets of what she considered to be effective Facebook Discourse participation and also in her gaining
literacy in this Discourse as evident in her ability to critique it and her enactment of it (Gee, 2015). If JJs enactment of
Facebook Discourse had always been accepted and she had always gotten positive reactions to her communication on
the site, she may not have been able to develop the ability to critique her Facebook participation and reflect critically
on whether this participation was effective.
Relatedly, in her choice to avoid personal opinions and her status updates that revealed little evidence of her voice
as a writer, JJ exercised a sophisticated rhetorical awareness of the messages she wanted to forward on the site and how
they would be received. When read alone, her text-based status updates appeared to be sparsely furnished with detail
9 The algorithm driving Facebooks adaptive news feed uses metadata collected from users activity to shape what users see: The frequency
with which an individual user interacts with other specific users content determines how often he or she will see content from those users, and
high-activity content, such as posts with more likes and comments, are displayed to users more frequently (How does News Feed decide which
stories to show?, 2016). Eslami et al. (2015) found that many Facebook users are unaware of this algorithm and its resultant effects on their news
feeds. The algorithm may explain why JJs second or third posts on a given date received more likes than first posts, as these subsequent posts would
be more likely to appear in the news feed of users who had liked a first post. Because the screenshot data did not allow me to view which friends
had liked posts, I was unable to analyze whether the same friends liked multiple posts.
or supporting reasons for her ideas, yet when read in conjunction with JJs own explanation of her choice to avoid
sharing personal information on the site, we can see that these statuses were purposefully stripped of the details they
lacked. Ivanic (1998) explained that the choice not to do certain things is opting for a different identity a self defined
by the affiliations it avoids (p. 230). JJ avoided posts that were too personal . . . like my opinion because of the
lack of reaction she received to the personal status updates she made as a younger user. We can see in this decision to
strip statuses of personal details that one of JJs rejected identities (p. 230), that of what she perceived to be a nave,
over-sharing user, helps to constructed her preferred identity, that of a somewhat aloof user who circulated information
without imbuing it with much opinion.
JJs discussion of how she resists what she perceives to be dominant practices on Facebookthose mainstream
types of posts she avoidsreveals a negotiation in which she is constructing a persona by recognizing and rejecting a
set of values held by others in her networked publics. Though I cannot describe the wider dominant ideologies at play
in the specific contexts of JJs life, having not gathered data on these wider contexts, it is likely that the practices JJ
perceives as dominant among her Facebook peers convey a version of those dominant ideologies to her, since the effects
that ideologies have on a writer arrive through the writers perceptions of readers values and expectations (Ivanic,
1998). The characteristics JJ perceives as defining others Facebook Discourse act as a conduit to bring the dominant
ideologies of the particular moment in time in which JJ is using Facebook to her. We could say that in JJs moves to resist
mainstream Facebook use, she was attempting to resist what she perceived, via her readers, to be dominant ideologies
of her time. It is interesting to note, though, that the identity JJ crafted in resistance to a mainstream identity is simply
another of many possibilities for self-hood (Ivanic, 1998). The identity she negatively defined as mainstream may be
defined positively by another Facebook user as hip or trendy, while the non-mainstream identity that JJ considered to
be unusual is simply another identity option, one other users might term alternative or independent but consider to be
a designation shared by many.
We can see, too, in JJs negotiation of a Facebook persona that she was responding to the values of her imagined
audience. Ivanic (1998) described how writers identities are shaped, nurtured or constrained by their anticipation
of known or imagined reader(s), finding in her research that writers make a range of choices in whether to kowtow
to what they perceive to be readers expectations or resist those expectations in favor of forwarding an identity they
personally prefer (p. 215). As I noted previously, while expectations for communicative and behavioral practices may
be defined in some Discourse spheres, such as in academic writing contexts, a social network site is a Discourse
sphere that does not come with a rulebook. Thus, not only was JJ defining her own rules for effective participation, she
was simultaneously defining the parameters of her imagined networked publics behavior. As Lisa Ede and Andrea
Lunsford wrote, It is the writer who, as writer and reader of his or her own text, one guided by a sense of purpose and
by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play
(pp. 165166). JJs establishment of a set of roles for her audience developed over time as she tried out, inadvertently
at first, different ways of communicating on Facebook and found over time what types and quantity of communication
her audience responded to favorably.
Given JJs ability to critique her own Facebook participation, I argue that she is literate in Facebook Discourse.
What is more, at the level of written discourse participation on the site, JJ engaged in rhetorically sophisticated activity
in crafting a persona and forwarding information in certain ways at certain times to achieve certain audience reactions.
The ways that JJ geared her activity toward an audience coupled with the ways she hid her personal opinion and
constructed a non-mainstream persona make her a curator on Facebook: someone who chooses what to share and the
arrangement in which to share it while keeping herself largely absent from the collection.10 As a curator of Facebook
content, JJs role is similar to that of a museum exhibit curator. The art, or, in JJs case, noteworthy Facebook content,
is largely not of her own creation, and her opinions and personal stance are absent from much of it, yet the presentation
of this collectionnot only what is shown, but how much and whenis geared toward the reception it will receive
from an audience. In JJs words, she find[s] items, a term that evokes searching and discovery, then share[s] items,
a term that literally refers to the share option on Facebook and figuratively labels her posts as contributive acts. She
is curating content on Facebook by, for the most part, not creating it but seeking out sources of information, sifting
10 I am grateful to Matthew Gappmayer for introducing me to the concept of social network activity as curation.
through what they offer, choosing information worthy of passing along, and determining the best time to share it.11 JJs
role in curating Facebook content makes evident her agency within these rhetorical choices. While her choices to avoid
overly personal posts, not post too often, and post at certain times of the day are bred from a desire to enact effective
Facebook Discourse, the parameters of which she learned over time, she was in control of these choices and used each
rhetorical step to craft a particular presence on the site. JJ had a clear purpose on Facebook, to forward interesting
and informative content to her audience while presenting herself as a non-mainstream source for such content, and her
rhetorical choices were made with this purpose in mind.
5. Critical reection on social network literacies in rst-year composition courses
This study of JJs Facebook activity joins related studies (Buck, 2012; McLean, 2010; Shepherd, 2015; Takayoshi,
2015; Turkle, 2011; Yi & Hirvela, 2010) in demonstrating students awareness of and purposeful choices within
composing activity on social network sites. Findings in the study indicate that JJ made purposeful choices in constructing
a Facebook persona but that her explanation of that persona did not always align with what her composing choices on
Facebook revealed. The interview conversation I had with her serves as an example of the value of students reflecting
critically on their social network activity because, when prompted to reflect critically, JJ was able to offer an insightful
and nuanced articulation of her rhetorical construction of a non-mainstream, not-too-personal self on Facebook. Were JJ
to be given the opportunity to reflect further and the guidance to make connections across writing contexts, her awareness
of how she is constructing a Facebook persona could benefit her understanding of how she constructs herself on the
page for academic purposes. As we guide students participation in academic discourse, we can draw on their existing
composing activity on social network sites such as Facebook to prompt awareness of and critical reflection on everyday
writing practices and the transfer of rhetorical strategies from such practices to academic writing situations. Facilitating
such reflection on existing writing practices enables students to better understand and to assess the efficacy of those
practices (Amicucci, 2011; Berthoff, 1984; Shipka, 2005; Yancey, 1998), and such reflection is a useful precursor to
critical reflection on the application of existing practices to new communicative situations, which enables students
transfer of knowledge from one writing context to another (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). As Kathleen Blake
Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczaks (2014) Teaching for Transfer research reveals, when students engage in
ongoing reflection on their writing processes and the content of their writing educationincluding on central concepts
and how students see those concepts fitting into their individual, self-defined theories of writingthey are able to see
how the content of writing practice can be moved between and employed across multiple writing contexts.
My interview with JJ prompted her to reflect on her choices in Facebook Discourse, including choices she had
made with the intent of actively resisting what she perceived to be mainstream practices of site participation. Similar
methods to those used the interview portion of this study can be employed in a first-year composition course to prompt
students reflection on their construction of a persona on a social network site and on the ways that this persona reifies
or resists what students perceive to be dominant expectations within the sites networked publics. First, students can
be asked to reflect in general terms about their social network use by discussing the sites they use and why they use
them, how long they have used these sites, and who they connect with via social networks. Next, students can choose
one site and work with other users to define what they perceive to be dominant communicative expectations on the
site and the actions or behaviors that are typically considered acceptable or unacceptable by site users. Students can
then be asked to study their own site activity and describe how often they post, what types of posts they produce, what
persona or version of themselves they present through posts, and how this persona aligns with or goes against norms
for expected site behavior. Given the nature of the research study, JJ did not engage in this type of sustained, recursive
reflection on her rhetorical choices on Facebook, though we can imagine that such extended reflection may have led
her to identify the same inconsistencies I did between her intentions in constructing a persona and the persona created
by some of the content on her Facebook timeline.
Through progressive reflection steps, an instructor can lead students from the arguably familiar territory of everyday
writing on a social network site to perhaps less familiar territory of reflecting in explicit terms on the expectations
of such a communicative space. Careful attention to existing social network practices can reveal for students the
11 It is not my intent to imply that social network activity involves the same expertise as formal curation. See Miya Tokumitsu (2015) for a discussion
of the use of the term curation in reference to individuals picking stuff in everyday contexts such as that of social network sites.
complex negotiations they make in deciding whether and how to participate in digital networked publics, and once
students have had the opportunity to practice this critical reflection in relation to everyday writing practices, they
can be asked to follow a similar procedure to reflect critically on the academic writing practices they perform and
on the dominant expectations for writing in academia. Were a student like JJ to be asked to make this connection in
her first-year composition course, for example, she could be asked to reflect further on what makes certain types of
Facebook activity mainstream and then to identify what the mainstream features are in academic writing; it would
be interesting to discuss with a student like JJ the value of resisting mainstream discourse practices on a social network
site in contrast with the perhaps detriment of resisting such discourse expectations in an academic writing context.
Such reflection could lead to more critical discussion of how JJ is constructing herself as a writer within an academic
setting and how this construction may align with or differ from her Facebook persona and writing voice. Ivanics (1998)
research revealed several participants who underwent uncomfortable navigations of academic discourse expectations;
she described one student, for example, as zigzagging between . . . two facets of her identity, but not entirely at one
with either of them (p. 155). Faculty frequently witness students struggling to reconcile the personae they habitually
exhibit as writers with the expectations of academic writing assignments. Through critical reflection, students can come
to see how these identity negotiations are at play in their academic work in a manner similar to the way they negotiate
identities in social network participation.
In addition to being asked to think broadly about persona construction, students can be introduced more specifically
to the debate surrounding writerly voice in composition studies. Following Elbows (2007) assertion that voice is worth
discussing in our literature because students and teachers are talking about it anyway, I posit that the conflicting views
surrounding voice are worth discussing in the classroom. We can introduce students to the questions of voice our field
wrestles with by employing writing activities that make voice tensions visible to students (Tougaw, 2009). Following
a reflection sequence similar to that described in the previous two paragraphs for prompting students to think about
persona construction in social networks, students can be asked to analyze examples of each others posts and discuss
how they hear the voice of a writer along the lines of Elbows (1994) explication of voice qualities, attending to features
such as what voice in writing sounds like to a reader-as-listener, what qualities the writer behind a voice in writing
appears to have, and whether a writer speaks with authority. Following this reflection, the instructor can present a series
of excerpts from traditional academic essays, and students can repeat the process of reflecting on voice by analyzing
academic texts.
We can also draw on JJs example of attending to audience behavior and adapting Facebook activity in response
to consider how social network participation can inform students reflection on the role of an audience in academic
discourse. JJ used the behaviors she witnessed in her own and others reactions to certain types of posts to determine
what readers on Facebook care about. As Yancey et al. (2014) wrote, student writers often have a sense of genre and
write inside the conventions of genre, but they dont develop a conceptual understanding of or a language for genre
(p. 28). In order to understand genre and audience expectations in both social network and academic writing, students
need to reflect on the parameters of such expectations in ways that make these parameters explicit and give students a
language for describing them. Along these lines, students can be asked to examine their writing or posting habits on a
social network site by reflecting on what readers they imagine when they post, how they imagine readers reacting to
what they write, and whether thinking about such readers affects what or how they post on a site.
Asking students to reflect on persona, voice, and audience in social network activity and in academic writing can
promote awareness: Such reflection prompts students to recognize how they make purposeful choices to construct a
persona across all rhetorical situations, how the textual features of their writing affect readers interpretation of the
writer on the page, and how the presence of those readers influences their own composing processes. A necessary next
step beyond awareness, however, is to prompt students to take action based on the knowledge they gain through critical
reflection. To do so, we can ask students to articulate a writers manifesto: a statement defining who they are as writers
in both academic and non-academic writing spaces, their purposes for writing across multiple contexts, and the results
they hope to achieve or accomplish through their writing both inside and outside of school. A writers manifesto can
prompt students to articulate their own roles as agentive writers within an academic setting. After students engage in
reflection on social network activity throughout a first-year composition course and work to gain awareness of the ways
academic discourse and their roles as writers within it employ processes of rhetorical choice similar to their everyday
writing practices, students can be asked to articulate their intended roles and aims as academic writers, defining what
they hope to accomplish through writing in their continued college education and what steps they will take as writers
to accomplish these goals.
My suggestion to have students articulate a writers manifesto in order to define their intents and propose action steps
as they think beyond first-year composition to future academic writing situations emerges from Yancey, Robertson,
and Taczaks signature theory of writing assignment in which students work to identify and understand what they
individually perceive to be central concepts of writing and then define individual theories of the craft. Whereas the
theory of writing is a high-stakes assignment focused on facilitating students transfer of concepts from one writing
situation to another, I suggest a writers manifesto as a lower-stakes writing task to aid in facilitating students transfer
of a sense of themselves as agentive writers operating across writing situations. Critical reflection that culminates in
promoting student agency can help students see and take ownership of the valuable ways that their writing practices in
digital, social spaces can inform their writing in academic spaces. As noted previously, JJ enacts the role of a curator on
Facebook, a role involving rhetorical choices made in service of a specific purpose. Her discussion of the content she
collects and shares, content she hopes her audience will read and enjoy, demonstrates her desire to provide a service to
readers. Buck (2012) has argued that students who participate in such social networking activity bring nuanced literacy
experience into writing courses. Yet students, as developing members of the academy, are often stripped of agency
within a course context. When asked to write on required topics within assignments that have required parameters,
students may not perceive a purpose beyond earning a grade for their work as writers. Students who articulate a writers
manifesto defining their aims in both non-academic and academic writing can make strides toward identifying purposes
beyond course requirements for their work as writers in academic settings. In asking students to reflect critically on
their rhetorical choices on social network sites and on the similar role of rhetorical choice in academic writing, we can
help students reflect on academic discourse conventions in order to understand these conventions and their agency as
writers within them. What is particularly exciting about JJs social network use is that, as a first-year college writer,
she has learned a sophisticated way of enacting Facebook Discourse that draws on the tenets of rhetorical abilities she
will be expected to exercise in the academy, yet she has sponsored her own progress in doing so. By asking students
to reflect on their literacy activity on social network sites, we can take a first step toward showing students how they
are already skilled as writers and rhetoricians and help students articulate their own aims for utilizing their rhetorical
skills as they move into new writing situations.
Ann N. Amicucci is Director of First-Year Rhetoric and Writing and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs,
where she teaches first-year composition, writing pedagogy, and undergraduate seminars in rhetoric. Her research focuses on first-year college
students digital literacies, reading studies, and pedagogies for college writing. Her recent work has appeared in The CEA Forum, TESOL Journal,
Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
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Rhetoricla Choices in Facebook Discourse-Constructing Voice and Persona

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Rhetoricla Choices in Facebook Discourse-Constructing Voice and Persona

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Rhetorical Choices in Facebook Discourse: Constructing Voice and

Keywords: Facebook; Secondary Discourse literacy; Voice; Persona; Qualitative research

E-mail address: aamicucc@uccs.edu

1. Facebook as a secondary Discourse

2. Methods of data collection and analysis

2.1. Data collection procedures

2.2. Limitations of methods

3. Findings: A writers voice and persona construction on Facebook

3.1. Opinions are out, epigrams are in

describe emoji in JJs Facebook activity.

3.2. Performing a non-mainstream Facebook self

3.3. Adapting to audience behavior

4. Discussion: Evidence of secondary Discourse participation and Facebook literacy

5. Critical reection on social network literacies in rst-year composition courses

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