Identity, audience and community in writing research

A short message to the reader Patrick J. CoppockUniversity of Modena and Reggio EmiliaReggio EmiliaItaly e-mail: coppock.patrick@unimo.itReggio Emilia, November 2000 Dear Reader, The following chapter is a revised and somewhat expanded version of a manuscript prepared for an introductory talk I gave at the opening of the international writing research conference held in November 1999 at the University of San Marino, The Semiotics of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing. It was this conference which gave rise to the volume which you now (presumably) are holding in your hands.In what follows, I have chosen to preserve as much of the original ‘oral’, rather personal style of my presentation as possible. I have done this in order to try and make explicit some implicit, and I believe important, issues regarding the role of identity – as expressed and developed through personal experience, and subsequently, private and public writing and discourse practices – in developing an intimate relationship with an audience of others, and on the basis of this intimacy, an extended community of inquiry.This strategically oriented stylistic choice on my part may perhaps annoy or even offend you as reader to begin with, in seeming to transgress some of the textual and interactional norms traditionally implicit in what we generally refer to as ‘scientific’ or ‘academic’ writing. But I hope you will bear with me a while – at least long enough to gather some overall impression of what I have tried to do in what I write here. If after doing so, you should then decide to abandon any further attempts to follow up, or interpret my message, then of course the fault remains entirely mine. Thanks for your attention in this matter. Patrick