Deborah brandt literacy in american lives

Want help with the readings in Writing about Writing?

Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs have created helpful Assist Tags to help you get the most from each reading. Look at pages 58–59 for more details on each tag.

CARS: Territory Look Ahead CARS: Niche Reread CARS: Occupy Read Later Conversation Speed Up Extending Forecasting Framework Making Knowledge Research Question So What?

Look at these readings to see the tags at work:

Chapter 2 — Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy” (p. 68)

Chapter 3 — James Paul Gee, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” (p. 274)

Chapter 4 — Keith Grant-Davie, “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” (p. 484)

Chapter 5 — Sondra Perl, “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” (p. 738)

Then try using the tags yourself as you read the other selections in Writing about Writing.

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WRITING ABOUT WRITING A College Reader

THIRD EDITION

WRITING ABOUT WRITING A College Reader

ELIZABETH WARDLE Miami University

DOUG DOWNS Montana State University

FOR BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Editorial Director, English: Karen S. Henry Senior Publisher for Composition, Business and Technical Writing, Developmental Writing: Leasa Burton

Executive Editor: John E. Sullivan III Executive Development Manager: Jane Carter Developmental Editor: Leah Rang Production Editor: Pamela Lawson Media Producer: Rand Thomas Production Manager: Joe Ford Executive Marketing Manager: Joy Fisher Williams Project Management: Jouve Text Permissions Researcher: Mark Schaefer Permissions Editor: Kalina Ingham Photo Researcher: Susan Doheny Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Design: Laura Shaw Design, Inc. Cover Design: John Callahan Composition: Jouve Printing and Binding: LSC Communications

Copyright © 2017, 2014, 2011 by Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

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For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000)

ISBN 978-1-319-07112-7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 903–906, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover.

PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS

Writing about Writing is part of a movement that continues to grow. As composition instructors, we have always focused on teaching students how writing works and on helping them develop ways of thinking that would enable them to succeed as writers in college. We found ourselves increasingly frustrated, however, teaching traditional composition courses based on topics that had nothing to do with writing. It made far more sense to us to have students really engage with writing in the writing course; the best way to do this, we decided, was to adopt a “writing about writing” approach, introducing students directly to what writing researchers have learned about writing and challenging them to respond by writing and doing research of their own. After years of experimenting with readings and assignments, and watching our colleagues do the same, we developed Writing about Writing, a textbook for first-year composition students that presents the subjects of composition, discourse, and literacy as its content. Here’s why we think Writing about Writing is a smart choice for composition courses.

Writing about Writing engages students in a relevant subject.

One of the major goals of the writing course, as we see it, is to move students’ ideas about language and writing from the realm of the automatic and unconscious to the forefront of their thinking. In conventional composition courses, students are too often asked to write about an arbitrary topic unrelated to writing. In our experience, when students are asked to read and interact with academic scholarly conversations about writing and test their opinions through their own research, they become more engaged with the goals of the writing course and — most important — they learn more about writing.

Writing about Writing engages students’ own areas of expertise.

By the time they reach college, students are expert language users with multiple literacies: They are experienced student writers, and they’re engaged in many other discourses as well — blogging, texting, instant messaging, posting to social networking sites like Facebook and Snapchat, and otherwise using language and writing on a daily basis. Writing about Writing asks students to work from their own experience to consider how writing works, who they are as writers, and how they use (and don’t use) writing. Students might wonder, for example, why they did so poorly on the SAT writing section or why some groups of people use writing that is so specialized it seems intended to leave others out.

This book encourages students to discover how others — including Sondra Perl, Deborah Brandt, James Paul Gee, their instructors, and their classmates — have answered these questions and then to find out more by doing meaningful research of their own.

Writing about Writing helps students transfer what they learn.

Teachers often assume that students can automatically and easily “apply” what they learn in a writing course to all their other writing — or at the very least, to other college writing. This assumption sees writing and reading as “basic” universal skills that work the same regardless of situation. Yet research on transfer of learning suggests that there is nothing automatic about it: Learning transfer researchers David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon found that in order to transfer knowledge, students need to explicitly create general principles based on their own experience and learning; to be self-reflective, so that they keep track of what they are thinking and learning as they do it; and to be mindful — that is, alert to their surroundings and to what they are doing rather than just doing things automatically and unconsciously. A writing course that takes language, writing, reading, and literacy as its subjects can help students achieve these goals by teaching them to articulate general principles such as “Carefully consider what your audience needs and wants this document to do.” In addition, it teaches them to reflect on their own reading, writing, and research processes.

Writing about Writing has been extensively class tested — and it works.

The principles of this writing-about-writing approach have been well tested and supported by the experience of writing instructors and thousands of students across the country. Writing about Writing was formally class tested in a pilot at the University of Central Florida, an experiment that yielded impressive outcomes in comparative portfolio assessment with more traditional composition courses. Assessment results suggest, among other things, that the writing-about-writing approach had a statistically significant impact on higher-order thinking skills — rhetorical analysis, critical thinking about ideas, and using and integrating the ideas of others. The writing-about-writing approach also had a significant impact on how students and teachers engaged in writing as a process. The first and second editions of Writing about Writing were used in a variety of composition programs across the country, and based on positive feedback from those users, we have even greater confidence that this approach — and this third edition — is successful.

Features of Writing about Writing FRAMED AROUND THRESHOLD CONCEPTS ABOUT WRITING

Writing about Writing is organized around concepts and principles from Writing Studies with which we think students should become familiar; we identify these as “threshold concepts,” and we spend the entire first chapter discussing them in detail, and engaging students in activities to think about how they apply to their lives. Threshold concepts are concepts that learners must become acquainted with in order to progress in that area of study — they are gateways to learning. Naming and using threshold concepts is an approach that has been used in the United Kingdom and now increasingly in the United States and other countries to improve teaching and learning in various disciplines and programs, including Writing Studies (for example, see the 2015 publication Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies). Because they are central to work in a particular field but are often assumed and unstated, threshold concepts when explicitly identified can better help students come to understand ideas that are central to that field or phenomenon. Researchers Ray Land and Jan (Erik) Meyer have argued that threshold concepts are

often troublesome and can conflict with common knowledge about a phenomenon. We think that this is particularly true when it comes to writing. Much of what we have learned as a field about writing conflicts with commonly held assumptions about writing. For example, many people believe that “good writers” are people for whom writing is easy, while research about writing suggests that “good writers” are people who persist, revise, and are willing to learn from their failures. Threshold concepts are the organizing theme for the third edition of Writing about

Writing, and we’ve arranged them in a sequence that we believe assists understanding of each subsequent concept:

Chapter 1, “Threshold Concepts: Why Do Your Ideas about Writing Matter?” introduces and defines threshold concepts and describes some central concepts about writing that conflict with common ideas of writing in popular culture.

Chapter 2, “Literacies: How Is Writing Impacted by Our Prior Experiences?” engages the threshold concept that our prior experiences deeply impact our writing and literacy practices, or in simpler terms, that our reading and writing past will shape our reading and writing present.

Chapter 3, “Individual in Community: How Does Writing Help People Get Things Done?” engages the threshold concept that people use texts and discourse in order to do something, to make meaning. And the texts and language they create mediate meaningful activities. People construct meaning through texts and language, and texts construct meaning as people use them.

Chapter 4, “Rhetoric: How Is Meaning Constructed in Context?” explores the threshold concepts that writing helps people make meaning and get things done, that “good” writing is dependent on writers, readers, situation, technology, and use, and

therefore that there are always constraints on writing.

Chapter 5, “Processes: How Are Texts Composed?” engages several threshold concepts about writing, including that writing is a process, all writers have more to learn, and writing is not perfectible.

CHALLENGING AND ENGAGING READINGS

Because our intention in putting this book together was to invite students directly into scholarly conversations about writing, most readings in the book are articles by rhetoric and composition scholars. We looked for work that was readable by undergraduates, relevant to student experience, effective in modeling how to research and write about writing, and useful for helping students frame and analyze writing-related issues. We drew not only on our own experience with students but also on feedback from a nationwide network of faculty using writing-about-writing approaches to composition and on the feedback of teachers who used the first two editions of the book. The articles in this edition expose students to some of the longest-standing questions and some of the most interesting work in our field, encouraging them to wrestle with concepts we’re all trying to figure out. Of course, we don’t expect first-year students to read these texts like graduate students

or scholars would — that is, with a central focus on the content of the readings, for the purposes of critiquing them and extending their ideas. Instead, we intend for them to be used as springboards to exploration of students’ own writing and reading experiences. The readings — and thus this book — are not the center of the course; instead, they help students develop language and ideas for thinking through the threshold concepts identified above, and begin exploring them by considering their own experiences with writing, discourse, and literacy, and their (and the field’s) open questions. While most readings are scholarly, we include a number of other sorts of texts

throughout this edition. There are new pieces written directly for the student readers of this book, including Chapter 1, with readings on genre theory and rhetorical reading written by us, and an introduction to rhetoric by Doug Downs and a discussion of document design and social justice written by Natasha Jones and Stephanie Wheeler (both in Chapter 4); short pieces by fiction and nonfiction writers (including Anne Lamott, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Mellix, and Malcolm X); and a research report by the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Group led by Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson. These readings, combined with the others in the book, help students approach the threshold concepts about writing from a variety of perspectives.

REAL STUDENT WRITING

Writing about Writing also includes student voices, with eight pieces of student writing. We

have continued to draw from Young Scholars in Writing, the national peer-reviewed journal of undergraduate research in Writing Studies and rhetoric, and from Stylus, the University of Central Florida Writing Program’s peer-reviewed first-year student publication. Given their nature as reprinted scholarly articles, we have treated the student essays the same as we have treated the professional essays: They are framed and introduced and accompanied by questions and activities. We want the students who use this book to see other students as participants in the ongoing conversations about writing; we hope this will enable them to see themselves as potential contributors to these conversations. This time around, rather than placing all the student readings at the end of the chapter, we have integrated them into the chapters where we thought they best fit into the conversation.

SCAFFOLDED SUPPORT FOR LEARNING

The material presented in this book is challenging. We’ve found that students need guidance in order to engage with it constructively, and many instructors appreciate support in teaching it. Therefore, we’ve scaffolded the material in ways that help make individual readings more accessible to students and that help them build toward mastery of often complex rhetorical concepts.

The book begins with a chapter written directly to a student audience. Chapter 1 not only explains the purpose of the book, but explains why and how the book is organized around threshold concepts of Writing Studies and provides extended explanation of these concepts. This chapter also provides an introduction to genre theory and rhetorical reading in order to help students engage in the readings of this book (and the rest of their college experience). We outline some reading strategies and an overview of John Swales’s CARS model of research introductions to assist with this. There you will also find a reading by Stuart Greene that asks students to think about this class and book as inquiry, and a reading by Richard Straub that helps prepare students for responding to each other’s writing. Reflective activities throughout the chapter as well as sections of reading support and tips on “Using This Book” — including a descriptive guide to the Reading Assist Tags feature — prepare students to engage with Writing about Writing.

Chapters 2–5 begin with a chapter introduction that explains the chapter’s threshold concepts, summarizes the chapter’s content and goals, and overviews each reading and its central ideas by placing it in the larger conversation at play within the chapter. These introductions are robust discussions of background knowledge and principles that help students better approach the threshold concepts the chapter includes.

Each reading begins with a Framing the Reading section offering background on the author and the text as well as Getting Ready to Read suggestions for activities to do before reading and questions to ask during reading.

Each reading is followed by two sets of questions: Questions for Discussion and Journaling, which can be used in class or for homework, and Applying and Exploring Ideas, which recommends medium-scale reading-related writing activities (both individual and group). A Meta Moment concludes the post-reading question set and asks students to reflect on the selection’s ideas in the context of the chapter’s threshold concept and of their own writing experiences. These questions and activities are designed to make teachers’ jobs easier by providing a variety of prompts that have been class tested by others.

Each chapter ends with the Writing Assignments section. Building on one or more of the readings from the chapter, assignments are designed to help students achieve the goals outlined in the chapter introduction. Though these assignments hardly scratch the surface of what’s possible, these have proven to be favorites with us, our students, and other teachers.

The book includes a glossary of technical terms in composition that students will encounter in their readings. Terms in the glossary, such as rhetorical situation and discourse, are noted in the chapter and reading introductions via bold print.

A note on citation styles.

While the selection introductions reflect current MLA style from the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (2016) in citation and documentation, other material in the book, all previously published, remains written in the citation styles used by the journals and books in which they were originally published, current at those times. This means you should expect to see a great deal of variation from current MLA, APA, CMS, or journal-specific style guidelines — a decision that we hope will provide instructors with an excellent starting point for conversation about how citation actually works in the “real world” of academic publication over time.

New to the Third Edition DIVERSE AND RELEVANT NEW READINGS

The third edition features eight new professional essays. Selections by authors such as Sandra Cisneros (“Only Daughter”), popular in many first-year writing courses, are offered through a writing-about-writing lens to promote and understand literacy. Now integrated throughout Chapters 2–5, readings on multimodality and on technology in writing, such as Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss’s “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery” and Stacey Pigg’s “Coordinating Constant Invention: Social Media’s Role in Distributed Work,” relate to our evolving conceptions of writing in a networked and

digital age. Other notable new additions include Vershawn Ashanti Young’s “‘Naw, We Straight’: An Argument Against Code Switching”; James M. Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”; and Liane Robertson, Kara Taczak, and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Notes toward a Theory of Prior Knowledge.” Six of the eight student essays in this edition are also new. Now dispersed through each

chapter to show the importance and relevance of students’ engagement with Writing Studies, these student texts present topics relevant to students today: explorations of literacy by rejecting labels of “remedial” writing (Arturo Tejada, Jr. et al.), rhetorical analyses of social media and library catalog pages (Komysha Hassan), studies of bilingual writing processes (Lucas Pasqualin and Alcir Santos Neto), and more.

A MORE ACCESSIBLE AND TEACHABLE INTRODUCTION TO THRESHOLD CONCEPTS, GENRE, AND RHETORICAL READING

The new Chapter 1, “Threshold Concepts: Why Do Your Ideas about Writing Matter?,” explains the ideas and rationale of the writing-about-writing approach to students directly. Students are introduced to the threshold concepts that frame the chapters in Writing about Writing with relatable examples and conversational language. A new section introduces genre and rhetorical reading as threshold concepts that assist academic reading and writing, providing a foundation for students as they engage with articles of Writing Studies scholarship. The Write Reflectively and Try Thinking Differently activities get students writing and thinking actively about each threshold concept, and Questions for Discussion and Journaling and Applying and Exploring Ideas allow students to reflect on the entire chapter and their conceptions of writing from the beginning of the course.

READING ASSIST TAGS

Chapters 2–5 each present one foundational or challenging selection as a Tagged Reading. These selections feature two types of Reading Assist Tags: Genre Cues to help students see and understand genre conventions and rhetorical moves, and Reading Cues such as “Look Ahead” and “Reread” to help students find and understand the key points of each article. A fresh design color-codes the two different tags and provides extended commentary for each cue below the main text, but remains in the margins to allow annotation and flexibility for working with the readings. A two-page chart in Chapter 1 (pages 58–59) explains each tag’s meaning and function and serves as a useful reference for students throughout the course.

AN UPDATED GLOSSARY

New and revised glossary terms such as ecology, embodiment, and velocity present more coverage of key concepts of writing, both the concepts presented in this edition’s reading selections as well as terminology from the evolving field of Writing Studies.

ECOLOGY An ecology is, literally, the interactions among groups of living things and their environments (and the scientific study of those interactions). More broadly, “ecology” has come to refer to any network of relationships among beings and their material surroundings. In rhetorical terms, ecology refers to the web of relationships and interactions between all the rhetors and all the material in a rhetorical situation. Like other meanings of ecology, it is difficult to define the boundaries of a rhetorical ecology because elements in an ecology will also connect to elements outside the ecology.

EMBODIED, EMBODIMENT Rhetorical interaction happens with, to, and by beings with material bodies. The term embodiment reminds us that such interaction is contingent on the bodies that give it shape. It is easy to assume that rhetorical interaction is simply ideas worked on mentally apart from bodies; when we look for how rhetorical interaction is embodied, we remember that the interaction depends on material bodies as well as ideas.

VELOCITY Based on the term from physics meaning movement at some rate in some direction, rhetorical theorists use velocity to describe how a text “moves” or is transformed through time and space. A text may be written into new forms or taken to new places. Analysis of velocity attends to both direction — where the text “goes” or how it is transformed — and rate — how quickly the transformation takes place. The concept of velocity is available not just to analysts but to rhetors themselves, who can compose and inscribe a text with a specific velocity in mind to begin with.

NEW IDEAS FOR WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

This edition features seven new Writing Assignments, now designed to be more clearly visible at the end of each chapter. These engaging projects are class-tested favorites that respond to the concepts presented in the new reading selections and include a challenge to students to explore their conceptions about writing, reading, and research; a reflection on gaining authority in new discourse communities; and an analysis of rhetorical velocity in social media.

MORE SUPPORT IN THE INSTRUCTOR’S EDITION OF WRITING ABOUT WRITING

Some teachers won’t need any supplements at all, including the discussion questions and major assignment options. But we have designed the book to be as accessible and supportive as possible to composition instructors with a wide range of experience, including new graduate students and very busy adjuncts. Toward that end, we provide a revised instructor’s resource manual written by Matt Bryan, which builds on the previous two editions written by Deborah Weaver and Lindee Owens. All three of these instructors are teacher-trainers at the University of Central Florida, who themselves piloted an early

version of this book and taught the material in it to a number of other composition teachers there. This material, bound together with the student text in a special Instructor’s Edition, includes the following:

frequently asked questions

sample course calendars

chapter overviews

lists of key vocabulary for each chapter

key student outcomes for each chapter

a list of readings that can help teach key student outcomes

summaries and take-home points for each reading

supplemental activities that help teach to each outcome

The manual is also available for download on the instructor’s resources tab on the catalog page for Writing about Writing at macmillanlearning.com.

Acknowledgments We came to writing-about-writing independently of one another, in different ways, and became better at it as a result of working together. David Russell was a mentor for us both. Elizabeth came to writing-about-writing as a result of her dissertation research, which Russell chaired and supported. Doug came to it as a result of questions about building better research pedagogy, directly fueled by Russell’s work on the history of college research-writing instruction and his chapter in Joseph Petraglia’s Reconceiving Writing. Initially, Elizabeth’s interest was theoretical (“this might be an interesting idea”) while Doug’s was quite practical (he designed and studied a writing-about-writing class for his dissertation). We discovered each other’s common interest through dialog on the WPA-L listserv, two independent clauses and a long-term collaboration was born. It is fair to say that neither of us would have written this book without the other, as we both seem to get a lot more done when working collaboratively. (We remember vividly two hours in the sunshine at the University of Delaware, at the 2004 WPA conference, when we took our first steps at figuring out collaboration.) So, if it’s not too corny, we would like to acknowledge collaboration in general, our collaboration in particular, and tenure and promotion systems at our institutions that have recognized collaborative work for the valid, challenging, and rewarding process it is. To many, many people — colleagues, mentors, and friends — we owe a deep debt of

gratitude for putting the ideas grounding Writing about Writing “in the air.” In addition, over

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the five years that it took to build the first edition of this book, and the three years we planned and wrote the second edition, and in the year and a half it took to write the third edition, we met many wonderful teacher-scholars who inspired us to keep going. Over many dinners, SIGs, conference panels, e-mail discussions, and drinks, we learned and are still learning a lot from them. A partial list of people who helped us start on this path or rethink it and make it better includes Linda Adler-Kassner, Anis Bawarshi, Barb Bird, Shannon Carter, Dana Driscoll, Heidi Estrem, Michelle LaFrance, Moriah McCracken, Susan McLeod, Laurie McMillan, Michael Michaud, Michael Murphy, Sarah Read, Jan Rieman, David Russell, Betsy Sargent, Jody Shipka, David Slomp, Susan Thomas, Jennifer Wells, Kathi Yancey, and Leah Zuidema.