Summary

Based on Wardle and Downs’ research, the first edition of Writing about Writing marked a milestone in the field of composition. By showing students how to draw on what they know in order to contribute to ongoing conversations about writing and literacy, it helped them transfer their writing-related skills from first-year composition to other courses and contexts. Now used by tens of thousands of students, Writing about Writing presents accessible writing studies research by authors such as Mike Rose, Deborah Brandt, John Swales, and Nancy Sommers, together with popular texts by authors such as Malcolm X and Anne Lamott, and texts from student writers. Throughout the book, friendly explanations and scaffolded activities and questions help students connect to readings and develop knowledge about writing that they can use at work, in their everyday lives, and in college. The new edition builds on this success and refines the approach to make it even more teachable. The second edition includes more help for understanding the rhetorical situation and an exciting new chapter on multimodal composing. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Writing about Writing, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do.

The conversation on writing about writing continues on the authors' blog, Write On: Notes on Writing about Writing (a channel on Bedford Bits, the Bedford/St. Martin's blog for teachers of writing).

Author Biography

Elizabeth Wardle is Associate Professor and the Director of Writing Outreach Programs in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests center on genre theory, the transfer of writing-related knowledge, and composition pedagogy. 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 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.

Introduction

John Swales, Create a Research Space (CARS) Model of Research Introductions
Richard Straub, Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’ Writing
Stuart Greene, Argument as Conversation: The Role of Inquiry in Writing a Researched Argument
Chapter 1: Literacies: Where Do Your Ideas About Reading and Writing Come From?
Deborah Brandt, Sponsors of Literacy
Donald M. Murray, All Writing Is Autobiography

*Thomas Newkirk, Draw Me a Word—Write Me a Picture
*Victor Villanueva, From Bootstraps: From an Academic of Color
Malcolm X, Learning to Read
Sherman Alexie, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
*Jabari Mahiri and Soraya Sablo, Writing for Their Lives: The Non-School Literacy of California’s Urban, African American Youth
*Kevin Roozen, Tracing Trajectories of Practice: Repurposing in One Student's Developing Disciplinary Writing Processes
*Erika Jackson, Past Experiences and Future Attitudes in Literacy (first-year student text)

*Emily Strasser, Writing What Matters: A Student’s Struggle to Bridge the Academic/Personal Divide (first-year student text)

[e-Page] Shirley Brice Heath, Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions
Chapter 2: Individual in Community: How Do Texts Mediate Activities?
John Swales, The Concept of Discourse Community
Lucille McCarthy, A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College Student Writing across the Curriculum
Sean Branick, Coaches Can Read, Too: An Ethnographic Study of a Football Coaching Discourse Community (first-year student text)

*Donna Kain and Elizabeth Wardle, Activity Theory: An Introduction for the Writing Classroom
Elizabeth Wardle, Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces
*Victoria Marro, The Genres of Chi Omega: An Activity Analysis (first-year student text)

[e-Page] Tony Mirabelli, Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers
[e-Page] James Paul Gee, Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction
Chapter 3: Rhetoric: How Is Meaning Constructed in Context?
*William Covino and David Jolliffe, What Is Rhetoric?
Keith Grant-Davie, Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents
*Charles Bazerman, Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People
James Porter, Intertextuality and the Discourse Community
Christina Haas and Linda Flower, Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning
Margaret Kantz, Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively
*Brian Martin, Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis
*Sarah-Kate Magee, College Admissions Essays: A Genre of Masculinity (first-year student text)

*Maria Post, Obama’s Speech at Howard: Becoming King (first-year student text)

[e-Page] *Andrew Cline, A Rhetoric Primer
[e-Page] Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler, Reading and Writing without Authority
[e-Page] Ken Hyland, From Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing
[e-Page] John Dawkins, Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool
Chapter 4: Processes: How Are Texts Composed?
*Paul Prior, Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being

Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts
Mike Rose, Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block
*Peter Elbow, The Need for Care: Easy Speaking onto the Page Is Never Enough
*Nancy Sommers, I Stand Here Writing
*Nancy Sommers, Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers
Carol Berkenkotter, Decisions and Revisions: The Planning Strategies of a Publishing Writer, and Donald M. Murray, Response of a Laboratory Rat—or, Being Protocoled
*Donald M. Murray, The Maker’s Eye
Sondra Perl, The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers
*Dorothy A. Winsor, Joining the Engineering Community: How Do Novices Learn to Write Like Engineers?
*Thomas Osborne, Late Nights, Last Rites, and the Rain-Slick Road to Self-Destruction (first-year student text)

*Marissa Penzato, Fanfiction, Poetry, Blogs, and Journals: A Case Study of the Connection Between Extracurricular and Academic Writing (first-year student text)

[e-Page] Junot Diaz, Becoming a Writer
[e-Page] Barbara Tomlinson, Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision
[e-Page] Lauren Perry, Writing with Four Senses: A Hearing Impaired Person’s Writing (first-year student text)

Chapter 5: Multi-Modal Composition: What Counts as Writing?
Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies
*Amanda Lenhart, Aaron Smith, Alexandra Rankin Macgill, and Sousan Arafeh, Pew Research Center Publications, Writing, Technology, and Teens: Summary of Findings
*Naomi S. Baron, Instant Messaging and the Future of Language
*Jeff Grabill, William Hart-Davidson, Stacey Pigg, Michael McLeod, Paul Curran, Jessie Moore, Paula Rosinski, Tim Peeples, Suzanne Rumsey, Martine Courant Rife, Robyn Tasaka, Dundee Lackey, and Beth Brunk-Chavez, Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students
*Christian Kohl, Wolf-Andreas Liebert, and Thomas Metten, History Now: Media Development and the Textual Genesis of Wikipedia
*Brandon Jones, Rhetorical Criticism of Online Discourse (first-year student text)

*Michaela Cullington, Texting and Writing (first-year student text)

[e-Page] *Steve Bernhardt, Seeing the Text
[e-Page] *James Sosnoski, Hyper-Readers and their Reading Engines
[e-Page] *Ann Cochran, Blogging the Recovery from Anorexia: A New Platform for the Voice of ED (first-year student text)　

*New to this edition

Supplemental Materials

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