Writing about writing elizabeth wardle pdf

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.

this page left intentionally blank

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.

1 0 9 8 7 6 f e d c b a

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.