Want help with the readings in Writing about Writing? Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs have created helpful Assist Tags to help you get the most from each reading. Look at pages 58–59 for more details on each tag. CARS: Territory Look Ahead CARS: Niche Reread CARS: Occupy Read Later Conversation Speed Up Extending Forecasting Framework Making Knowledge Research Question So What? Look at these readings to see the tags at work: Chapter 2 — Deborah Brandt, “Sponsors of Literacy” (p. 68) Chapter 3 — James Paul Gee, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction” (p. 274) Chapter 4 — Keith Grant-Davie, “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” (p. 484) Chapter 5 — Sondra Perl, “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers” (p. 738) Then try using the tags yourself as you read the other selections in Writing about Writing. this page left intentionally blank WRITING ABOUT WRITING A College Reader THIRD EDITION WRITING ABOUT WRITING A College Reader ELIZABETH WARDLE Miami University DOUG DOWNS Montana State University FOR BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Editorial Director, English: Karen S. Henry Senior Publisher for Composition, Business and Technical Writing, Developmental Writing: Leasa Burton Executive Editor: John E. Sullivan III Executive Development Manager: Jane Carter Developmental Editor: Leah Rang Production Editor: Pamela Lawson Media Producer: Rand Thomas Production Manager: Joe Ford Executive Marketing Manager: Joy Fisher Williams Project Management: Jouve Text Permissions Researcher: Mark Schaefer Permissions Editor: Kalina Ingham Photo Researcher: Susan Doheny Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik Text Design: Laura Shaw Design, Inc. Cover Design: John Callahan Composition: Jouve Printing and Binding: LSC Communications Copyright © 2017, 2014, 2011 by Bedford/St. Martin’s. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the Publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America. 1 0 9 8 7 6 f e d c b a For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116 (617-399-4000) ISBN 978-1-319-07112-7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 903–906, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover. PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS Writing about Writing is part of a movement that continues to grow. As composition instructors, we have always focused on teaching students how writing works and on helping them develop ways of thinking that would enable them to succeed as writers in college. We found ourselves increasingly frustrated, however, teaching traditional composition courses based on topics that had nothing to do with writing. It made far more sense to us to have students really engage with writing in the writing course; the best way to do this, we decided, was to adopt a “writing about writing” approach, introducing students directly to what writing researchers have learned about writing and challenging them to respond by writing and doing research of their own. After years of experimenting with readings and assignments, and watching our colleagues do the same, we developed Writing about Writing, a textbook for first-year composition students that presents the subjects of composition, discourse, and literacy as its content. Here’s why we think Writing about Writing is a smart choice for composition courses. Writing about Writing engages students in a relevant subject. One of the major goals of the writing course, as we see it, is to move students’ ideas about language and writing from the realm of the automatic and unconscious to the forefront of their thinking. In conventional composition courses, students are too often asked to write about an arbitrary topic unrelated to writing. In our experience, when students are asked to read and interact with academic scholarly conversations about writing and test their opinions through their own research, they become more engaged with the goals of the writing course and — most important — they learn more about writing. Writing about Writing engages students’ own areas of expertise. By the time they reach college, students are expert language users with multiple literacies: They are experienced student writers, and they’re engaged in many other discourses as well — blogging, texting, instant messaging, posting to social networking sites like Facebook and Snapchat, and otherwise using language and writing on a daily basis. Writing about Writing asks students to work from their own experience to consider how writing works, who they are as writers, and how they use (and don’t use) writing. Students might wonder, for example, why they did so poorly on the SAT writing section or why some groups of people use writing that is so specialized it seems intended to leave others out. This book encourages students to discover how others — including Sondra Perl, Deborah Brandt, James Paul Gee, their instructors, and their classmates — have answered these questions and then to find out more by doing meaningful research of their own. Writing about Writing helps students transfer what they learn. Teachers often assume that students can automatically and easily “apply” what they learn in a writing course to all their other writing — or at the very least, to other college writing. This assumption sees writing and reading as “basic” universal skills that work the same regardless of situation. Yet research on transfer of learning suggests that there is nothing automatic about it: Learning transfer researchers David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon found that in order to transfer knowledge, students need to explicitly create general principles based on their own experience and learning; to be self-reflective, so that they keep track of what they are thinking and learning as they do it; and to be mindful — that is, alert to their surroundings and to what they are doing rather than just doing things automatically and unconsciously. A writing course that takes language, writing, reading, and literacy as its subjects can help students achieve these goals by teaching them to articulate general principles such as “Carefully consider what your audience needs and wants this document to do.” In addition, it teaches them to reflect on their own reading, writing, and research processes. Writing about Writing has been extensively class tested — and it works. The principles of this writing-about-writing approach have been well tested and supported by the experience of writing instructors and thousands of students across the country. Writing about Writing was formally class tested in a pilot at the University of Central Florida, an experiment that yielded impressive outcomes in comparative portfolio assessment with more traditional composition courses. Assessment results suggest, among other things, that the writing-about-writing approach had a statistically significant impact on higher-order thinking skills — rhetorical analysis, critical thinking about ideas, and using and integrating the ideas of others. The writing-about-writing approach also had a significant impact on how students and teachers engaged in writing as a process. The first and second editions of Writing about Writing were used in a variety of composition programs across the country, and based on positive feedback from those users, we have even greater confidence that this approach — and this third edition — is successful. Features of Writing about Writing FRAMED AROUND THRESHOLD CONCEPTS ABOUT WRITING Writing about Writing is organized around concepts and principles from Writing Studies with which we think students should become familiar; we identify these as “threshold concepts,” and we spend the entire first chapter discussing them in detail, and engaging students in activities to think about how they apply to their lives. Threshold concepts are concepts that learners must become acquainted with in order to progress in that area of study — they are gateways to learning. Naming and using threshold concepts is an approach that has been used in the United Kingdom and now increasingly in the United States and other countries to improve teaching and learning in various disciplines and programs, including Writing Studies (for example, see the 2015 publication Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies). Because they are central to work in a particular field but are often assumed and unstated, threshold concepts when explicitly identified can better help students come to understand ideas that are central to that field or phenomenon. Researchers Ray Land and Jan (Erik) Meyer have argued that threshold concepts are often troublesome and can conflict with common knowledge about a phenomenon. We think that this is particularly true when it comes to writing. Much of what we have learned as a field about writing conflicts with commonly held assumptions about writing. For example, many people believe that “good writers” are people for whom writing is easy, while research about writing suggests that “good writers” are people who persist, revise, and are willing to learn from their failures. Threshold concepts are the organizing theme for the third edition of Writing about Writing, and we’ve arranged them in a sequence that we believe assists understanding of each subsequent concept: Chapter 1, “Threshold Concepts: Why Do Your Ideas about Writing Matter?” introduces and defines threshold concepts and describes some central concepts about writing that conflict with common ideas of writing in popular culture. Chapter 2, “Literacies: How Is Writing Impacted by Our Prior Experiences?” engages the threshold concept that our prior experiences deeply impact our writing and literacy practices, or in simpler terms, that our reading and writing past will shape our reading and writing present. Chapter 3, “Individual in Community: How Does Writing Help People Get Things Done?” engages the threshold concept that people use texts and discourse in order to do something, to make meaning. And the texts and language they create mediate meaningful activities. People construct meaning through texts and language, and texts construct meaning as people use them. Chapter 4, “Rhetoric: How Is Meaning Constructed in Context?” explores the threshold concepts that writing helps people make meaning and get things done, that “good” writing is dependent on writers, readers, situation, technology, and use, and therefore that there are always constraints on writing. Chapter 5, “Processes: How Are Texts Composed?” engages several threshold concepts about writing, including that writing is a process, all writers have more to learn, and writing is not perfectible. CHALLENGING AND ENGAGING READINGS Because our intention in putting this book together was to invite students directly into scholarly conversations about writing, most readings in the book are articles by rhetoric and composition scholars. We looked for work that was readable by undergraduates, relevant to student experience, effective in modeling how to research and write about writing, and useful for helping students frame and analyze writing-related issues. We drew not only on our own experience with students but also on feedback from a nationwide network of faculty using writing-about-writing approaches to composition and on the feedback of teachers who used the first two editions of the book. The articles in this edition expose students to some of the longest-standing questions and some of the most interesting work in our field, encouraging them to wrestle with concepts we’re all trying to figure out. Of course, we don’t expect first-year students to read these texts like graduate students or scholars would — that is, with a central focus on the content of the readings, for the purposes of critiquing them and extending their ideas. Instead, we intend for them to be used as springboards to exploration of students’ own writing and reading experiences. The readings — and thus this book — are not the center of the course; instead, they help students develop language and ideas for thinking through the threshold concepts identified above, and begin exploring them by considering their own experiences with writing, discourse, and literacy, and their (and the field’s) open questions. While most readings are scholarly, we include a number of other sorts of texts throughout this edition. There are new pieces written directly for the student readers of this book, including Chapter 1, with readings on genre theory and rhetorical reading written by us, and an introduction to rhetoric by Doug Downs and a discussion of document design and social justice written by Natasha Jones and Stephanie Wheeler (both in Chapter 4); short pieces by fiction and nonfiction writers (including Anne Lamott, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Mellix, and Malcolm X); and a research report by the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Group led by Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson. These readings, combined with the others in the book, help students approach the threshold concepts about writing from a variety of perspectives. REAL STUDENT WRITING Writing about Writing also includes student voices, with eight pieces of student writing. We