Writing about Writing

by Elizabeth Wardle, Doug Downs

Overview

Since its initial publication, Writing about Writing has empowered tens of thousands of students to investigate assumptions about writing and to explore how writing works. It does so by making writing itself the subject of inquiry. Unique to Wardle and Downs’ approach, the text presents “threshold concepts” about writing—central ideas that writers need to understand in order to progress. As they come to a deeper understanding of these threshold concepts, students are able to transfer their understanding to any writing situation they encounter.

This new edition has been refined and improved based on input from instructors using the text. Now with more explicit instruction to support academic writers, a new Part One explains the value of investigating writing, introduces threshold concepts and the notion of transfer, details the elements of genre and rhetorical reading, and offers a guide for conducting writing studies research at a level appropriate for undergraduates. The readings chapters have been updated and streamlined, and as in past editions they are supported with introductions, scaffolded questions, and activities. An extensive Instructor’s Manual by teacher-trainer Matt Bryan provides support for teaching with a writing-about-writing approach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781319195861
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	09/16/2019
Edition description:	Fourth Edition
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.45(w) x 9.05(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

ELIZABETH WARDLE is an associate professor and the Director of Writing Programs at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests center on genre theory, transfer of writing-related knowledge, and infusing composition classrooms with the field's best understandings of how writing works. She is currently conducting a study examining the impact of smaller class size on the learning of composition students, as well as a study examining the impact of the writing-about-writing pedagogy on student writing and attitudes about writing.

 

DOUG DOWNS is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition in the Department of English at Montana State University. His research interests center on research-writing pedagogy and facilitating undergraduate research both in first-year composition and across the undergraduate curriculum. He continues to work extensively with Elizabeth Wardle on writing-about-writing pedagogies and is currently studying problems of researcher authority in undergraduate research in the humanities.

 

Table of Contents

PART ONE

Chapter 1: Investigating Writing: Threshold Concepts and Transfer

Chapter 2: Readers, Writers, and Texts: Understanding Genre and Rhetorical Reading

Chapter 3: Research: Participating in Conversational Inquiry about Writing

PART TWO

Chapter 4: Composing

Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts

Sondra Perl, The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers

Nancy Sommers, Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers

Mike Rose, Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block

John R. Gallagher, Considering the Comments: Theorizing Online Audiences as Emergent Processes

Teresa Thonney, Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse

Richard Straub, Responding — Really Responding — to Other Students’ Writing

Jaydelle Celestine, Did I Create the Process? Or Did the Process Create Me? [first-year student text]

Brittany Halley, Materiality Matters: How Human Bodies and Writing Technologies Impact the Composing Process [student text]

Chapter 5: Literacies

Deborah Brandt, Sponsors of Literacy

Malcolm X, Learning to Read

Victor Villanueva, Excerpt from Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color

Arturo Tejada Jr., Esther Gutierrez, Brisa Galindo, DeShonna Wallace, and Sonia Castaneda, Challenging Our Labels: Rejecting the Language of Remediation [first-year student text]

Vershawn Ashanti Young, Should Writers Use They Own English?

Julie Wan, Chinks in My Armor: Reclaiming One’s Voice [first-year student text]

Chapter 6: Rhetoric

Doug Downs, Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making

Maulana Karenga, Nommo, Kawaida and Communicative Practice: Bringing Good into the World

Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Multilingual Writing as Rhetorical Attunement

Paul Heilker and Jason King, The Rhetorics of Online Autism Advocacy: A Case for Rhetorical Listening

Kelly Medina-López, Pardon My Acento: Racioalphabetic Ideologies and Rhetorical

Recovery through Alternative Writing Systems

Resa Crane Bizzaro, Shooting Our Last Arrow: Developing a Rhetoric of Identity for Unenrolled American Indians

Heather Yarrish, White Protests, Black Riots: Racialized Representation in American Media [student text]

Chapter 7: Communities

James Paul Gee, Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction

John Swales, Reflections on the Concept of Discourse Community

James E. Porter, Intertextuality and the Discourse Community

Sean Branick, Coaches Can Read, Too: An Ethnographic Study of a Football Coaching Discourse Community [first-year student text]

Tony Mirabelli, Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers

Perri Klass, Learning the Language

Elizabeth Wardle, Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces

Elizabeth Wardle and Nicolette Mercer Clement, Double Binds and Consequential Transitions: Considering Matters of Identity During Moments of Rhetorical Challenge

Lidia Cooey-Hurtado, Danielle Tan, and Breagh Kobayashi, Rhetoric Deployed in the Communication Between the National Energy Board and Aboriginal Communities in the Case of the Trans Mountain Pipeline [student text]