Writing Studies

This essay explores Chicanx identity in academia through critical race theory (CRT) counterstory. A turn to CRT is an interdisciplinary approach that allows writing programs, faculty, and writing program administrators to ready the field of rhetoric and composition for the increasing number of diverse students enrolling in higher education. CRT challenges the institution’s status quo injustices toward racial minorities and works to expose institutionalized and systemic racism as it exists and continues to flourish in American institutions. Furthermore, CRT counterstory is theorized methodology with potential for both scholarship and pedagogy in rhetoric and composition. An interdisciplinary method, CRT counterstory recognizes that the experiential and embodied knowledge of people of color is legitimate and critical to understanding racism, which is often well disguised in the rhetoric of normalized structural values and practices.

The nature of society means health and medical communication often occurs in different international and local settings. Such interactions generally involve offering care-practices that help individuals maintain or return to a level of health and wellness. These exchanges usually take place in different cultural, linguistic, and geopolitical environments involving individuals who: Provide care to others Educate others on care and caregiving Receive or participate in such care In these situations, care-related information must be contextualized to address how care is perceived and administered in such contexts. Doing so is not easy, for it requires an understanding of the cultural context of care. In this special issue, the authors examine a range of contexts of care to show how technical communicators and rhetoricians of health and medicine can work at the intersections of health, wellness, and culture to contribute to healthcare practice.

The entries in this volume introduce technical communicators to foundational practices, current approaches, and emerging trends in translation and localization. To do so, the editors of this collection purposefully recruited authors from the translation and localization industries. All of these contributors, moreover, have previous experiences, stretching back decades, working with technical communicators on international projects. Each individual was asked to contribute a chapter that explained, to a non-translator/non-localizer, what a particular translation or localization practice was and how it worked. Contributors were also asked to draw from their prior experiences working with technical communicators and focus on the question, “Based on your prior experiences working with technical communicators, what do they need to know to work effectively with translators and localizers?” The objective underlying this approach was to provide technical communicators with the understanding of translation and localization needed to work effectively with professionals in these fields.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) originated in US law schools, bringing together issues of power, race and racism to address the liberal notion of color-blindness and argues that ignoring racial difference maintains and perpetuates the status quo with its deeply institutionalized injustices to racial minorities. This essay introduces CRT as a theoretical frame by which to better understand discourses of race and racism in contemporary colorblind and supposed post-racial societies. This work is situated within rhetorical studies so as to trace connections between CRT scholarship and literatures in anti-racist rhetoric that seek to understand, challenge, and dismantle systems of racism.

Workshop, or peer-review, is part of writing in many genres. We cannot escape it. It should be beneficial for us as writers, but more often than not, it isn’t. In this article, the author describes how as writers, we fluctuate between the view that we suck and that our peers suck as writers which ultimately shuts down the productive potential of workshops. Sharing from her own experience in a creative writing workshop, the author describes how she learned to see the peer-review process differently after encountering “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” (the often inevitable “jackass” in workshops) who scribbles three meager words of useless judgment on deeply personal poems. At first, the author wants to run for the hills and never look back at writing again. Fortunately, her professor helps her see the value of workshop which the author passes along to us, here.

We first revisit, resituate, and extend the notion of rhetorical velocity and discuss its relationship to delivery and circulation through the lens of cultural mobility studies. Next we introduce a specific case study we can read through rhetorical velocity, delivery, mobilization, and circulation: a moment of civic disobedience in Lansing, Michigan. We situate graffiti as rhetorical action anchored by velocity and circulation by addressing an instance of tagging that frames graffiti art as a rhetorical tactic and community catalyst. We conclude by considering not only the reception and recomposition of texts but how the circulation and motion of texts leave impressions in and around places and spaces.

This paper calls attention to the issue of social and personal development in Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, focusing on how the novel appropriates and transmutes the conventions of the formation novel, formally known as the Bildungsroman, through the process and configuration of letter writing. Although the novel is written in an epistolary fashion, focusing on a series of letters sent to an undisclosed recipient, the overarching themes of these musings are focused on creating a social space in which the protagonist can record, evaluate, and deliberate his own position within his social context. These epistles also provide clarification of the pains and tribulations of achieving reconciliation between personal desire and social demand. Furthermore, a significant amount of these letters are focused on the execution and development of the act of writing, and more importantly, how writing influences and shapes the world of the protagonist.

This article explores the genre of creative nonfiction, highlighting the largely hidden processes that influence our appraisals of it. Using a framework that builds from genre theory, this work argues that by exposing and confronting the complexity of the mechanisms by which we judge writing to be factual, we can productively intervene in debates about writing’s veracity, and more broadly, we can better understand why we tend to discount divergent views on facts.

This descriptive article explores the uses of poetry and journaling exercises as means of helping students develop their self-reflective capacities within the context of international social work. First, self-reflection and its importance to social work practice and education is discussed. Second, the importance of self-reflection in international and cross-cultural work is highlighted. Third, the application of poetry and other journal writing exercises as a means of facilitating self-reflection is explored. Poems written in response to structured exercises by students who took part in an international experience in social work education in Leon, Nicaragua, are presented as examples. The exercises presented can be used by educators in various helping professions who seek to help their students expand their self-reflective skills and engage in cross-cultural and international practice.

"Durante las últimas décadas, en diversos países de América Latina, ha habido un interés por fomentar el uso de la escritura en los pueblos indígenas, con el fin de difundir y preservar el conocimiento tradicional y la memoria de estas culturas. Costa Rica no ha estado ajena a este proceso y, desde la década de los ochenta, se diseñaron alfabetos prácticos cuyo objetivo primordial era la creación de materiales tendientes a la alfabetización de población indígena costarricense. Sin embargo, el proceso anterior no estuvo acompañado de las acciones necesarias para implantar una escritura normalizada que permitiera a la población indígena escribir y leer de forma efectiva en su lengua nativa. Tal parece que la preocupación de los lingüistas y de las instituciones educativas se limitó a la creación de sistemas de escritura y no en el diseño de estrategias que permitieran que la comunidad indígena utilizara de forma adecuada dichos sistemas.

Este estudio constituye la primera evaluación de la competencia escrita hecha en una comunidad indígena costarricense. Su objetivo es analizar los problemas de escritura que actualmente se presentan en la región indígena de Chirripó, zona en la que se habla una variante dialectal del cabécar. A lo largo del trabajo, se describen las inconsistencias del sistema de escritura, se analizan sus causas y se proponen algunas acciones que podrían ayudar a normalizar la escritura. Los datos se obtuvieron a través de la aplicación de un instrumento que evaluó a competencia escrita de los maestros de lengua y cultura cabécar del territorio en cuestión y de estudiantes de secundaria que aprendieron a escribir cabécar en la escuela primaria. La información obtenida se comparó con publicaciones recientes escritas en dicha variedad lingüística. Los resultados indican que actualmente la escritura no constituye un medio eficaz de comunicación entre los cabécares de Chirripó, pues existen una serie de inconsistencias que le restan funcionalidad. Debido a lo anterior, resulta de primera necesidad diseñar acciones que permitan normalizar el sistema de escritura en dicha región."

In this article, the author presents an Indigenous Epistolary Methodology (IEM) to reflect on what it means for Indigenous women to engage thenotion of refusal in traditional writing methods and qualitative research.
The author proposes that an IEM, nestled within her familial genealogies, Indigenous Knowledges and Chicana Feminist Epistemology can provide a more expressive account of her relations as a mothering Indigenous and
Chicana Woman of Color in academia.

In this essay I review topics of access for multilingual-spectrum students to university spaces such as the classroom and graduate programs. Pulling from my own personal experience as a bilingual English speaker who was raised by bilingual Spanish speaking parents, this essay explores challenges met in monolingual white habitus US universities for students whose relationship to English (both spoken and written) is much more flexible, imaginative, and potentially transformative for institutional spaces.

(Summary) Bernstein teaches developmental courses in writing and reading at a public, open-admissions university in downtown Houston. Bernstein believes the courses are valuable because they help people with unconventional ways of learning reach their potential. » Jump to indexing (document details) Full Text (1317 words) (Copyright Oct. 10, 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education) More than 25 years ago, as an anxious freshman at a small, private, liberal-arts college in the Midwest, I sat stoically in front of a midterm exam in introductory geology. The course had been designed for geology majors, but it could be taken by nonmajors-like me-to fulfill the distribution requirement in science. Having grown up along with the environmental movement, I was very interested in nature and ecology, and I had especially appreciated the hands-on learning of our class's field trip to a limestone quarry near the Mississippi River, not far from our college. There, breathing the crisp autumn air and surrounded by dappled leaves on the changing trees, I had felt at peace. But peace was hardly what I experienced when I saw the charts and diagrams on the midterm. Although I had studied for the exam for days, I was lost without textbook illustrations that I could not reproduce from memory, and confused as I tried to remember how the lectures had fit with the professor's chalkboard drawings. I struggled through the multiple-choice and short-answer sections, squirming with frustration at the thought of my college career's ending as it was just beginning. Then I reached the essay section of the exam. I knew I was saved: I could write my way out of any pit that I managed to fall into. I don't remember the wording of the question, but I do remember my response. I wrote about our field trip to the limestone quarry-about the natural setting of that environment, including the features of the Midwestern landscape, the geological history that had led to the formation of limestone, and the dew on the spider webs almost hidden behind the trees.

Students and teachers alike bemoan the sorry state of academic writing, as both readers and writers. Nonetheless, they are loath to venture beyond what they take to be the well-known territory of the academic (read: expository) essay for fear of going astray, or unsettling their readers. Here I aim to map the academic essay as it is practised for the most part . . . but also as it might be practised. I offer a cartography — and something of a history — of the ‘point-first’ and ‘point-last’ essay. The former dominates the academy, but the latter is truer to the origin of the essay. Point-first essays allow writers to show what they know, to negotiate known territory (terra cognita), hence their dominance in the academy; point-last essays enable writers (and thereby readers) to find out what they think, to navigate unknown territory (terra incognita), where lie dragons . . . or riches.

This paper lays out the terms of inquiry for my Spring 2016 seminar at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, “Embodied Writing and Rhetoric.” It grows out of release time granted by UPRM for “A Comparative Inquiry on the Role of University GE Courses.” While giving grad students an overview of rhet-comp debates, I want to facilitate embodied learning, and integration of non-academic genres into their FYW courses. I also aspire to move with students towards a more philosophical overview, a la Lyotard’s “report on knowledge.” The turn towards the body, and embodied knowledge, is a dominant feature of current-day scholarship (and its epistemic crisis), I argue, as “incredibility towards metanarratives” was in Lyotard’s era.

Collaboration was an important area of study in writing for many years, but interest faded as scholars began to assume that those working within writing studies already "got it." In Beyond Conversation, William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy , and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration. While interrogating the institutional politics that circulate around debates about collaboration, this book offers a concise history of collaborative writing theory while proposing a new set of commonplaces for understanding the labor of coauthorship. Specifically, Beyond Conversation outlines an interactionist theory that explains collaboration as the rhetorical capacity that manifests in the discursive engagements coauthors enter into with the objects of their writing. Drawing on new materialist philosophies, post-qualitative inquiry, and interactionist rhetorical theory, Beyond Conversation challenges writing and literacy educators to recognize the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing in the work they do both as writers and as teachers of writing.

This article reports from five years of qualitative research into the languages and literacies of language brokers during tutoring sessions between emergent bilingual elementary school students, their mothers, and  homework mentors at an after-school program in New York City. My research explores the translanguaging practices (García, 2009; 2012) of participant youth language brokers who simultaneously translated and interpreted homework with adults. I examine translanguaging events during homework tutoring, documenting how practices such as language brokering develop tactical repertoires for youths communicating language arts assignments between their mothers, mentors, and peers. Emergent bilingual youth and their homework mentors at the after-school program involved Spanish dominant mothers in English language activities, permitting mothers increased collaboration in their children's homework assignments. Together, families and mentors worked to pool their bilingual resources in the practices of doing monolingualized homework multilingually and with meaningful involvement.

Au moment de l’écriture, le chercheur est tenté par la figuration. Il montre combien il est savant. Lexique et locution oiseuse sont là pour indiquer son allégeance théorique, rappeler qu’il fait bien de la « sociologie » ou de « l’anthropologie ». Beaucoup se contentent de cette pénible récitation pour ne pas pleinement assumer la responsabilité de leur texte. C’est ainsi que les maîtres font école. Mais cela peut ne pas suffire : la paralysie s’impose alors.

Discourse-based interviews (or DBIs) have long been used in writing research to investigate writers’ tacit genre knowledge, including their rhetorical motivations for sentence-level wordings. Meanwhile, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to uncover patterns of such wordings, ones that index community-valued ways of knowing and meaning. This article brings together these two methods in a novel way. By offering a case study of Richard, an advanced undergraduate writer majoring in philosophy at a U.S. university, the article demonstrates how systematic analysis of Richard’s writing informed and enriched DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. Specifically, corpus-based text analysis revealed that Richard regularly expressed an epistemic stance in his course essays in ways that are conventional and valued in philosophical argumentation, while the DBIs revealed that neither Richard nor Maria were consciously aware of these stance patterns, despite regular appearance in both their writing. Taken together, these findings point to the value of using corpus techniques prior to the DBI to identify meaningful choices in language that likely otherwise would be missed. The findings also raise important questions about the acquisition of disciplinary discourses and the sources of knowledge that foster that acquisition.

The book theorizes classroom writing assessment as an ecology, a complex system, that is “more than” its interconnected elements. This theory explains how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to all literacy learning by incorporating ideas about the white racial habitus that informs all dominant discourses in the academy and other markets. Furthermore, the theory helps teachers understand how important and central writing assessment is to student learning, and the unintended racism that often occurs because teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments. It’s main chapters offer an example of how to apply the theory using the author’s classroom and a heuristic for developing and critiquing writing assessment ecologies that is based on seven elements of any writing assessment ecology: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places.

Academic Writing, Real World Topics fills a void in the writing-across-the-curriculum textbook market. It draws together articles and essays of actual academic prose as opposed to journalism; it arranges material topically as opposed to by discipline or academic division; and it approaches topics from multiple disciplinary and critical perspectives. With extensive introductions, rhetorical instruction, and suggested additional resources accompanying each chapter, Academic Writing, Real World Topics introduces students to the kinds of research and writing that they will be expected to undertake throughout their college careers and beyond. Readings are drawn from various disciplines across the major divisions of the university and focus on issues of real import to students today, including such topics as living in a digital culture, learning from games, learning in a digital age, living in a global culture, our post-human future, surviving economic crisis, and assessing armed global conflict. The book provides students with an introduction to the diversity, complexity and connectedness of writing in higher education today.

Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.

COMMENTS

“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University

“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University

“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University

“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing

Comments from students using Real World Topics

“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University

“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University

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In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality.
Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication.
This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas.

"This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system."
Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University

In this essay, I analyze Malala Yousafzai’s memoir as a literacy narrative. When read as such, the book subverts Eurocentric imperialist paradigms and destabilizes the literacy myth. Yousafzai accomplishes this by performing “little” narratives of literacy that, together, promote literacy as a collective, universal achievement situated in a cultural ecology of literacy. She thus sidesteps questions of individual achievement and avoids falling prey to commodification claims. Malala’s story opens up new possibilities for sharing stories of literacy by offering multiple pathways to understand literacy and identity both locally and globally.

Transferable skills obtained through creative writing pedagogy can also be taught in English Language Arts contexts. For example, intercultural food stories can illustrate Common Core standards through a case study which fulfills the emphasis on narrative as one of three necessary types of writing.

Building on work in creative writing studies, which insists that creative writing is “an invaluable transferable skill” (Peary, 2015,  196), Stephens responds to Drew’s (2016) call for “creative writing scholars and their pedagogies to become more influential within secondary teacher training programs,” in order to “export” creative writing pedagogies more widely (p. 3);

Embodied expression is sketched as an area of inquiry that unites writing and communication instruction in many disciplines and domains;

Lee’s “Sea Urchin” and Santiago’s “How to Eat a Guava” are used as examples of embodied writing. Lee’s humor illustrates the stakes involved in intercultural food encounters. Santiago’s story is analyzed not only for its thematic material (what is lost and what is gained when moving between worlds), but for its utility in teaching transferable skills emphasized in Common Core standards, such as recognizing “figurative language, … and nuances in word meanings.”

The details and the process of creative writing assignments about food encounters are laid out & illustrated with examples from class instruction.

Corpus Linguistics has become a major trend in Applied Linguistics since the second half of the 20th century due to computing facilities. Nowadays teachers can research and assess their students’ production by means of compiling learner corpora. This article describes how this technique was used to investigate the usage of modals in the writing of advanced EFL learners studying at private language schools in Rio de Janeiro. When the research corpus is compared to the academic prose register studied by Biber et alii (1999), the divergence becomes apparent. The findings, thus, suggest that subjects write in a non-proficient way, which runs counter to previous expectations.

CROSSCULTURAL INTERACTION AND LANGUAGE HYBRIDIZATION

The role of language in mediating culture is emphasized, and examples of language hybridization are given as an indication of ongoing changes in the Russian system of values.

Key words: language, culture, value system, language hybridization

Nadine Gordimer's line about the difficulties of returning to "half-written letters" is used to frame anthropology's critique of "container cultures, " re: Cultural Studies. Anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Kirin Narayan describe "halfies" as in-between peoples who can help us understand fluid cultures as normative. Building on this stance, and rhetorical genre scholars, Stephens defines communicative cultures as "a set of shared commitments expressed through cultural means. " This approach views literature as an "ethnographic resource, " and is illustrated through an analysis of Jamaican writer Olive Senior's story "Country of the One Eye God. " The repeating patterns in Jamaican culture this approach reveals point to the wider utility of communicative cultures as an analytical concept.

The Modern Language Association's Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition had invited me to contribute a paper on the topic of "Rhetoric as a New Paradigm for English Studies" for the 2014 annual meeting of the MLA in Chicago. While the other participants at the session, Douglas Hesse (University of Denver), Peter Leslie Mortensen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Michael Bernard-Donals (University of Wisconsin, Madison), focused on illustrative examples of the cultural work rhetoric can do within the "English" paradigm, my own proposition as the only "English literature" person now at a major technological research institution turned out somewhat more radical. My thought experiment asked whether we need "English" departments at all, extending previous deliberations published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Design thinking is a process for identifying solutions to problems in certain contexts. The better one understands contextual factors affecting use and interaction, the more effectively one can use design thinking to address issues at the context and greater systems levels. This article examines how the cognitive science concepts of scripts and prototypes can help realize the potential of design thinking in different settings.