Writing Studies as a Mode of Inquiry by Susan Miller
Field called writing studies:
places a non evaluative spin
offering a way to describe the cultural work undertaken in any writing
Attention to the production over their interpretation
Analyzed with personal and social circumstances in which they are produced
Important: Writing study addresses acts of writing and their products as evidence of a particularly crucial cultural work in which a whole text offers an intellectual/expressive act that intersects circulating discursive practices
Our only evidence of events is shaped discourse, acts of composing and their results compromise the cultures, which we can misrecognized as different from a documents discourse
Relations between the writers and texts
All interests in the movies, sills, and extended developments of individual writers with knowledge of regulated social expectations
Some evidence of “counter-history”
WS most often addresses historical writing practices
The way in which a father would critique a son’s writing rather than a passive teacher, tutor, etc.:: historical writing practices + a cultural act
Different apporach:
As an ability rather than a culture
Connects the fact of a writing event to both its content and its significatipn among other texts
Assume writing is an activity
Bourgeouis instruction promotes the priviledged social and intellectual inadequacy
The Case for a Major in Writing Studies: David Beard
The object of Writing Studies at UMD is writing, defined as a practice, a tool for cognition and social action, and a force for sociocultural change.
In other essays, Bazerman defines Writing Studies by differentiation
greater variety of sociocultural effects of writing
a variety of writing forms sustain institutions, generate communities, and enable (or domesticate) individual and social cognition
We teach and research writing, defined as a practice, as a tool both for cognition & for social action, and as a force for sociocultural change.
We research and teach writing as a practice (with its own theoretical grounds).
We research and teach writing as a tool (used in a variety of human activities).
We research and teach writing as a historically embedded phenomenon that has transformed human socio-cultural structures.
When we teach writing as a practice, we teach the skills of rhetorical production—of crafting texts to rhetorical situations. We also research and teach reflection on writing as a tool—a component in both complex human activity systems and in individual human cognition.
Naming What We Know
3 terms: rhetoric, composition, and writing studies
Central theme: the study of composed knowledge
Threshold concepts of writing studies (37)
Represent what we know for now has knowledge is ever changing
In an effort to to nme what we know to ourselves and to students and faculty who are new to our discipline, it is also an effort and call to extend discussions about what we know to audiences beyond ourselves
Miller, S. (2002). Writing studies as a mode of inquiry. Rhetoric and composition as intellectual work, 41-54.