Building on scholarship that recognizes writing as a rich site of identity negotiation, this study introduces a sociolinguistic analytic frame based on Tannen’s multidimensional power/connection grid and multimodal and visual grammars to explore young writers’ identity work. By integrating Tannen’s framework with an identity and positioning lens, we show how children’s self-authoring reflects ongoing negotiations of status and connection, either affirming how they see themselves or challenging how others position them as writers. Using an interpretive case study of two first graders, we argue that writing identity work involves continuously maneuvering and negotiating levels of connection (closeness and distance) and status (hierarchy and equality) through literacy practices. Our findings reveal how these micro-level linguistic and multimodal negotiations unfold multidimensionally and shape identity and positioning, offering insights for educators to better support students’ writing identity development.

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.