Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

by Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth Wardle

Overview

Naming What We Know examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. The first part of the book defines and describes thirty-seven threshold concepts of the discipline in entries written by some of the field’s most active researchers and teachers, all of whom participated in a collaborative wiki discussion guided by the editors. These entries are clear and accessible, written for an audience of writing scholars, students, and colleagues in other disciplines and policy makers outside the academy. Contributors describe the conceptual background of the field and the principles that run throughout practice, whether in research, teaching, assessment, or public work around writing. Chapters in the second part of the book describe the benefits and challenges of using threshold concepts in specific sites—first-year writing programs, WAC/WID programs, writing centers, writing majors—and for professional development to present this framework in action.

Naming What We Know opens a dialogue about the concepts that writing scholars and teachers agree are critical and about why those concepts should and do matter to people outside the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874219890
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2015
Edition description:	1
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Linda Adler-Kassner is professor of writing studies and associate dean of undergraduate education at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus broadly on how literate agents and activities—such as writers, writing, writing studies—are defined in contexts inside the academy and in public discourse. She also examines the implications and consequences of those definitions and how writing faculty can participate in shaping them. She frequently works with faculty across disciplines on articulating threshold concepts and making them more accessible for students. She is author, coauthor, or coeditor of nine books, including Reframing Writing Assessment, Naming What We Know, and The Activist WPA. Elizabeth Wardleis the Howe Professor of English and director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She served as chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida (UCF). She also served as director of writing programs at UCF and at the University of Dayton. Her administrative experiences fed her ongoing interest in how students learn and how they transfer what they learn in new settings. With Doug Downs, she is the coauthor of Writing about Writing, a textbook that represents a movement to reimagine first-year composition as a serious content course that teaches transferable research-based knowledge about writing. She speaks frequently around the country on writing program design, how to teach for transfer, and how to identify and engage students in the threshold concepts of various disciplines. 

Read an Excerpt

Naming What We Know

Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies

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By Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth Wardle

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-577-2

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CHAPTER 1

Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity

1.0

Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity

KEVIN ROOZEN

It is common for us to talk about writing in terms of the particular text we are working on. Consider, for example, how often writers describe what they are doing by saying "I am writing an email" or "I'm writing a report" or "I'm writing a note." These shorthand descriptions tend to collapse the activity of writing into the act of single writer inscribing a text. In doing so, they obscure two foundational and closely related notions of writing: writers are engaged in the work of making meaning for particular audiences and purposes, and writers are always connected to other people.

Writers are always doing the rhetorical work of addressing the needs and interests of a particular audience, even if unconsciously. The technical writers at a pharmaceutical company work to provide consumers of medications with information they need about dosages and potential side effects. The father writing a few comments on a birthday card to his daughter crafts statements intended to communicate his love for her. Sometimes, the audience for an act of writing might be the writer himself. A young man jotting in his diary, for example, might be documenting life events in order to better understand his feelings about them. A child scribbling a phrase on the palm of her hand might do so as a way of reminding herself to feed the family pets, clean her room, or finish her homework. Writing, then, is always an attempt to address the needs of an audience.

In working to accomplish their purposes and address an audience's needs, writers draw upon many other people. No matter how isolated a writer may seem as she sits at her computer, types on the touchpad of her smartphone, or makes notes on a legal pad, she is always drawing upon the ideas and experiences of countless others. The technical writers at a pharmaceutical company draw collaboratively upon the ideas of others they work with as they read their colleagues' earlier versions of the information that will appear on the label. They also connect themselves to others as they engage with the laws about their products written by legislatures and the decisions of lawsuits associated with medications that have been settled or may be pending. The father crafting birthday wishes to his daughter might recall and consciously or unconsciously restate comments that his own parents included on the birthday cards he received as a child. As I work to craft this explanation of writing as a social and rhetorical activity, I am implicitly and explicitly responding to and being influenced by the many people involved in this project, those with whom I have shared earlier drafts, and even those whose scholarship I have read over the past thirteen years.

Writing puts the writer in contact with other people, but the social nature of writing goes beyond the people writers draw upon and think about. It also encompasses the countless people who have shaped the genres, tools, artifacts, technologies, and places writers act with as they address the needs of their audiences. The genres of medication labels, birthday wishes, and diary entries writers use have undergone countless changes as they have been shaped by writers in various times and places. The technologies with which writers act — including computer hardware and software; the QWERTY keyboard; ballpoint pens and lead pencils; and legal pads, journals, and Post-It notes — have also been shaped by many people across time and place. All of these available means of persuasion we take up when we write have been shaped by and through the use of many others who have left their traces on and inform our uses of those tools, even if we are not aware of it.

Because it conflicts with the shorthand descriptions we use to talk and think about writing, understanding writing as a social and rhetorical activity can be troublesome in its complexity. We say "I am writing an email" or "I am writing a note," suggesting that we are composing alone and with complete autonomy, when, in fact, writing can never be anything but a social and rhetorical act, connecting us to other people across time and space in an attempt to respond adequately to the needs of an audience.

While this concept may be troublesome, understanding it has a variety of benefits. If teachers can help students consider their potential audiences and purposes, they can better help them understand what makes a text effective or not, what it accomplishes, and what it falls short of accomplishing. Considering writing as rhetorical helps learners understand the needs of an audience, what the audience knows and does not know, why audience members might need certain kinds of information, what the audience finds persuasive (or not), and so on. Understanding the rhetorical work of writing is essential if writers are to make informed, productive decisions about which genres to employ, which languages to act with, which texts to reference, and so on. Recognizing the deeply social and rhetorical dimensions of writing can help administrators and other stakeholders make better decisions about curricula and assessment.

1.1

Writing Is a Knowledge-Making Activity

HEIDI ESTREM

Writing is often defined by what it is: a text, a product; less visible is what it can do: generate new thinking (see 1.5, "Writing Mediates Activity"). As an activity undertaken to bring new understandings, writing in this sense is not about crafting a sentence or perfecting a text but about mulling over a problem, thinking with others, and exploring new ideas or bringing disparate ideas together (see "Metaconcept: Writing Is an Activity and a Subject of Study"). Writers of all kinds — from self-identified writers to bloggers to workplace teams to academic researchers — have had the experience of coming upon new ideas as a result of writing. Individually or in a richly interactive environment, in the classroom or workplace or at home, writers use writing to generate knowledge that they didn't have before.

Common cultural conceptions of the act of writing often emphasize magic and discovery, as though ideas are buried and the writer uncovers them, rather than recognizing that "the act of creating ideas, not finding them, is at the heart of significant writing" (Flower and Hayes 1980, 22; see also 1.9, "Writing Is a Technology through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning"). Understanding and identifying how writing is in itself an act of thinking can help people more intentionally recognize and engage with writing as a creative activity, inextricably linked to thought. We don't simply think first and then write (see 1.6, "Writing Is Not Natural"). We write to think.

Texts where this kind of knowledge making takes place can be formal or informal, and they are sometimes ephemeral: journals (digital and otherwise), collaborative whiteboard diagrams, and complex doodles and marginalia, for example. These texts are generative and central to meaning making even though we often don't identify them as such. Recognizing these kinds of texts for their productive value then broadens our understanding of literacy to include a rich range of everyday and workplace-based genres far beyond more traditionally recognized ones. Naming these as writing usefully makes visible the roles and purposes of writing (e.g., Barton and Hamilton 1998; Heath 2012).

Understanding the knowledge-making potential of writing can help people engage more purposefully with writing for varying purposes. In higher education, for example, faculty from across the curriculum now often include a wider range of writing strategies in their courses. That is, beyond teaching the more visible disciplinary conventions of writing in their fields, faculty also integrate writing assignments that highlight what is less visible but highly generative about writing in many contexts: writing's capacity for deeper understandings and new insights (see Anson 2010 for one historical account of the shift in how faculty from across campus teach writing). Beyond the classroom, people can employ exploratory, inquiry-based writing tasks like free writing, planning, and mapping — sometimes individual and often collaborative. These strategies can help all writers increase their comprehension of subject material while also practicing with textual conventions in new genres. Through making the knowledge-making role of writing more visible, people gain experience with understanding how these sometimes-ephemeral and often-informal aspects of writing are critical to their development and growth.

1.2

Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences

ANDREA A. LUNSFORD

Writing is both relational and responsive, always in some way part of an ongoing conversation with others. This characteristic of writing is captured in what is referred to as the classic rhetorical triangle, which has at each of its points a key element in the creation and interpretation of meaning: writer (speaker, rhetor), audience (receiver, listener, reader), and text (message), all dynamically related in a particular context. Walter Ong (1975) referred to this history in his 1975 "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction," connecting the audience in oral performances with readers of written performances and exploring the ways in which the two differ. For Ong, the audience for a speech is immediately present, right in front of the speaker, while readers are absent, removed. Thus the need, he argues, for writers to fictionalize their audiences and, in turn, for audiences to fictionalize themselves — that is, to adopt the role set out for them by the writer.

Scholars in rhetoric and writing studies have extended this understanding of audience, explaining how writers can address audiences — that is, actual, intended readers or listeners — and invoke, or call up, imagined audiences as well. As I am writing this brief piece, for example, I am imagining or invoking an audience of students and teachers even as I am addressing the actual first readers of my writing, which in this case are the editors of this volume.

The digital age has brought with it the need for even closer consideration of audiences. We can no longer assume, for example, that the audience members for an oral presentation are actually present. And, especially in a digital age, writing cannot only address and invoke but also create audiences: as a baseball announcer in the film Field of Dreams (based on W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe) says, "If you build it, they will come." Writers whose works have "gone viral" on the web know well what it means to create an audience that has been unintended and indeed unimagined. Perhaps even more important, the advent of digital and online literacies has blurred the boundaries between writer and audience significantly: the points of the once-stable rhetorical triangle seem to be twirling and shifting and shading into one another. When consumers of information can, quite suddenly, become producers as well, then it's hard to tell who is the writer, who the audience. In addition, the deeply collaborative and social nature of literacy in a digital age not only calls into question earlier distinctions but allows for greater agency on the part of both writers and audiences.

Such shifting and expanding understandings of audience and of the ways writers interact with, address, invoke, become, and create audiences raise new and important questions about the ethics of various communicative acts and call for pedagogies that engage students in exploring their own roles as ethical and effective readers/audiences/writers/speakers/listeners in the twenty-first century.

1.3

Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to Be Reconstructed by the Reader

CHARLES BAZERMAN

The concept that writing expresses and shares meaning is fundamental to participating in writing — by writing we can articulate and communicate a thought, desire, emotion, observation, directive, or state of affairs to ourselves and others through the medium of written words. The potential of making and sharing meaning provides both the motive and guiding principle of our work in writing and helps us shape the content of our communications. Awareness of this potential starts early in emergent literacy experiences and continues throughout one's writing life but takes on different force and depth as one continues through life.

The expression of meanings in writing makes them more visible to the writer, making the writer's thoughts clearer and shareable with others, who can attempt to make sense of the words, constructing a meaning they attribute to the writer. While writers can confirm that the written words feel consistent with their state of mind, readers can never read the writer's mind to confirm they fully share that state of mind. Readers share only the words to which each separately attributes meanings. Thus, meanings do not reside fully in the words of the text nor in the unarticulated minds but only in the dynamic relation of writer, reader, and text.

While a writer's meanings arise out of the expression of internal thought, the meanings attributed by a reader arise from the objects, experiences, and words available to that reader. For readers, the words of the text index or point to accessible ideas, thoughts, and experiences through which they can reconstruct meanings based on what they already know (see 3.3, "Writing Is Informed by Prior Experience").

Although meaning is philosophically complex, children readily grasp it in practice as they learn that they can share their experiences through writing about it. As their writing develops, they can express or articulate meanings more fully and precisely concerning a wider range of experiences, with wider audiences and with greater consequences.

The idea that writing expresses and shares meaning to be reconstructed by the reader can be troublesome because there is a tension between the expression of meaning and the sharing of it. Often, we view our expressions as deeply personal, arising from inmost impulses. We may not be sure others will respond well to our thoughts or will evaluate us and our words favorably. Therefore, every expression shared contains risk and can evoke anxiety. Writers often hesitate to share what they have expressed and may even keep private texts they consider most meaningful. Further, writers may resist the idea that their texts convey to readers something different than what the writers intended. Feedback from readers indicating that the writer's words do not convey all the writer hoped is not always welcomed (see 4.1, "Text Is an Object Outside of One's Self that Can Be Improved and Developed"; 5.2, "Metacognition Is Not Cognition"; and 4.4, "Revision Is Central to Developing Writing").

Awareness that meaning is not transparently available in written words may have the paradoxical effect of increasing our commitment to words as we mature as users of written language. As writers we may work on the words with greater care and awareness of the needs of readers so as to share our expressions of meaning as best as we can with the limited resources of written language. As readers we may increase our attention to reconstructing writers' meanings despite the fragility of words. The vagaries of meaning also may become a resource for us as writers, whether we are poets evoking readers' projections of personal associations or lawyers creating loopholes and compromises.

1.4

Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words

DYLAN B. DRYER

This threshold concept is best illustrated with an example of how a particular word is defined and understood. If asked on the spot to define the word cup, an English speaker might say, "Well, it's a smallish drinking vessel, something you'd use for hot drinks like coffee or tea, so probably ceramic rather than glass; usually it has a little handle so your hand doesn't too hot." This is a perfectly serviceable definition, but the way it has been phrased glosses right over this threshold concept. To say that "a cup is a small ceramic drinking vessel" cannot be literally true, after all; the object used to serve hot drinks is not called into being by this sound, nor is there any reason for the phonemes symbolized by the three characters c, u and p to refer to this object (or to refer to it in English, at any rate; in German that object is referred to as die Tasse; in Mandarin as Cháwan; and so on.) Even English speakers don't always use that sound to mean a smallish ceramic drinking vessel. In the kitchen, cup is probably a unit of measure; in certain sporting circles, cup is the diminutive for the championship trophy (e.g., the Stanley Cup). Cup can even mean to hold something gingerly by not closing one's fingers about it, as one would cup an eggshell.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Coming to Terms: Composition/Rhetoric, Threshold Concepts, and a Disciplinary Core Kathleen Blake Yancey xvii

Naming What We Know: The Project of this Book Linda Adler-Kassner Elizabeth Wardle 1

Threshold Concepts of Writing

Metaconcept: Writing Is an Activity and a Subject of Study Elizabeth Wardle Linda Adler-Kassner 15

Concept 1 Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity

1.0 Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity Kevin Roozen 17

1.1 Writing Is a Knowledge-Making Activity Heidi Estrem 19

1.2 Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences Andrea A. Lunsford 20

1.3 Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to Be Reconstructed by the Reader Charles Bazerman 21

1.4 Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words Dylan B. Dryer 23

1.5 Writing Mediates Activity David R. Russell 26

1.6 Writing Is Not Natural Dylan B. Dryer 27

1.7 Assessing Writing Shapes Contexts and Instruction Tony Scott Asao B. Inoue 29

1.8 Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices John Duffy 31

1.9 Writing Is a Technology through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning Collin Brooke Jeffrey T. Grabill 32

Concept 2 Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms

2.0 Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms Charles Bazerman 35

2.1 Writing Represents the World, Events, Ideas, and Feelings Charles Bazerman 37

2.2 Genres Are Enacted by Writers and Readers Bill Hart-Davidson 39

2.3 Writing Is a Way of Enacting Disciplinary Neal Lerner 40

2.4 All Writing Is Multimodal Cheryl E. Ball Colin Charlton 42

2.5 Writing Is Performative Andrea A. Lunsford 43

2.6 Texts Gel Their Meaning from Other Texts Kevin Roozrn 44

Concept 3 Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies

3.0 Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies Tony Scoll 48

3.1 Writing Is Linked to Identity Kevin Roozen 50

3.2 Writers' Histories, Processes, and Identities Vary Kathleen Blake Yancey 52

3.3 Writing Is Informed by Prior Experience Andrea A. Lunsford 54

3.4 Disciplinary and Professional Identities Are Constructed through Writing Heidi Estrem 55

3.5 Writing Provides a Representation of Ideologies and Identities Victor Villanueva 57

Concept 4 All Writers Have More to Learn

4.0 All Writers Have More to Learn Shirley Rose 59

4.1 Text Is an Object Outside of Oneself That Can Be Improved and Developed Charles Bazerman Howard Tinberg 61

4.2 Failure Can Be an Important Part of Writing Development Collin Brooke Allison Carr 62

4.3 Learning to Write Effectively Requires Different Kinds of Practice, Time, and Effort Kathleen Blake Yancey 64

4.4 Revision Is Central to Developing Writing Doug Downs 66

4.5 Assessment Is an Essential Component of Learning to Write Peggy O'Neill 67

4.6 Writing Involves the Negotiation of Language Differences Paul Kei Matsuda 68

Concept 5 Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity

5.0 Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity Dylan B. Dryer 71

5.1 Writing Is an Expression of Embodied Cognition Charles Bazerman Howard Tinberg 74

5.2 Metacognition Is Not Cognition Howard Tinberg 75

5.3 Habituated Practice Can Lead to Entrenchment Chris M. Anson 77

5.4 Reflection Is Critical for Writers' Development Kara Taczak 78

Editorial Reviews

"Essentially a collection of insights from the most experienced and most knowledgeable scholars and practitioners in the field of writing studies. It is like that old video of “We Are the World,” where Stevie Wonder gives way to Paul Simon who hands it off to Willie Nelson to Michael Jackson to Diana Ross, and oh, even Bob Dylan showed up. . . . I found the book so rich in insight, that it’s best read piecemeal, the same way I’d read a collection of poetry, so each concept gets sufficient time to roll around my head."
—John Warner, Recommended Reading for the Start of the Semester, Inside Higher Ed

"I recommend this book to librarians as well as to faculty right across the disciplines. It packs a lot of knowledge about writing into a small but rich package. It also might provide librarians with a model for how to talk to our non-librarian colleagues about the big ideas we all hope students will grasp without reducing them to a checklist to be covered in library sessions."
—Barbara Fister,Inside Higher Ed
 

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