Notes: 1/9/19

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.