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.

学术写作中关于作者身份和关系的研究主要集中在研究文章上，而在作者与读者之间存在更为明显的不平等关系的文本中，很少有研究致力于文本的身份建构。本文对封闭式体裁中的人际关系（手稿审阅）进行了研究，并比较了审阅中作者与读者之间的关系以及三种不同的审稿人建议：“拒绝”，“主要修订”和“次要修订”。对在建议的构建中使用的精选词典词典特征的分析以及文本中作者和读者的存在表明，在“主要修订”和“拒绝”评论中，与“次要修订”评论相比，作者和读者之间的关系更加不平等。 。这是由于使用了强有力的指令，缺乏作者的存在以减轻负面评价和给出的建议，以及通过使用第二人称代词，尤其是在负面评论中，更直接地提及了作者。这项研究表明，在公共学术体裁中确定的礼貌和平等关系可能并不总是出现在私人学术体裁中，并且表明作者的性格可以根据目的，语境和体裁读者而变化。