Writing about Writing A College Reader

935 Pages·2017·22.28 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Wardle

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.
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