Writing about Writing
Fifth Edition ©2023 Elizabeth Wardle; Doug Downs Formats: Achieve, E-book, Print
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Authors
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Elizabeth Wardle
Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and Director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. She was Chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Director of Writing Programs at UCF and University of Dayton. These experiences fed her interest in how students learn and repurpose what they know in new settings. With Linda Adler-Kassner, she is co-editor of Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (2015), winner of the WPA Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Discipline (2016), and of (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy; with Rita Malenczyk, Susan Miller-Cochran, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, she is co-editor of Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018). Her current research focuses on how to enact grassroots change via writing across the curriculum programs, and her forthcoming co-edited collection with faculty from across disciplines is Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching and Learning Across Disciplines (2022).
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Doug Downs
Doug Downs is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and former Director of the Core Writing Program in the Department of English at Montana State University (Bozeman). His interests are in college-level writing, research, and reading pedagogy, especially as these intersect in first-year composition courses and in undergraduate research. He served as editor of Young Scholars in Writing, the national peer-reviewed journal of undergraduate research on writing and rhetoric, from 2015 to 2020. His current research projects involve methods of mentoring undergraduate research, inclusive writing pedagogies that help students grow as writers, and how we can teach rhetorics that foster constructive and cooperative public discourse.
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]
Product Updates
In Part One (Chapters 1-3), Wardle and Downs empower students to enter the conversation about writing and value the diversity of their language use and experiences. In these chapters, Wardle and Downs lay the foundation for students to engage with the readings and frame their work as inquiry. Using a conversational style and accessible examples, the authors cover such topics as the diversity of language and writing practices, what genres are and how writers depend on them, principles of rhetorical reading, and guidelines for conducting primary research on writing.
A new threshold concept, “rhetorical choices shape worlds,” focuses on how rhetorical practices have significant impacts on inclusion, equity, and justice (Chapter 6). An entirely new set of readings for Chapter 6 helps students understand and consider the implications of rhetorical theory.
New readings throughout Part Two reflect contemporary uses of writing in the world. Among them are new pieces on the nature of audience in online commenting, the daily literacy practices of multilingual writers, online advocacy for people with autism, and language use in reporting about different communities.
Authors
-
Elizabeth Wardle
Elizabeth Wardle is the Roger and Joyce Howe Distinguished Professor of Written Communication and Director of the Roger and Joyce Howe Center for Writing Excellence at Miami University. She was Chair of the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Director of Writing Programs at UCF and University of Dayton. These experiences fed her interest in how students learn and repurpose what they know in new settings. With Linda Adler-Kassner, she is co-editor of Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (2015), winner of the WPA Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Discipline (2016), and of (Re)Considering What We Know: Learning Thresholds in Writing, Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy; with Rita Malenczyk, Susan Miller-Cochran, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, she is co-editor of Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018). Her current research focuses on how to enact grassroots change via writing across the curriculum programs, and her forthcoming co-edited collection with faculty from across disciplines is Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching and Learning Across Disciplines (2022).
-
Doug Downs
Doug Downs is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and former Director of the Core Writing Program in the Department of English at Montana State University (Bozeman). His interests are in college-level writing, research, and reading pedagogy, especially as these intersect in first-year composition courses and in undergraduate research. He served as editor of Young Scholars in Writing, the national peer-reviewed journal of undergraduate research on writing and rhetoric, from 2015 to 2020. His current research projects involve methods of mentoring undergraduate research, inclusive writing pedagogies that help students grow as writers, and how we can teach rhetorics that foster constructive and cooperative public discourse.
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]
Product Updates
In Part One (Chapters 1-3), Wardle and Downs empower students to enter the conversation about writing and value the diversity of their language use and experiences. In these chapters, Wardle and Downs lay the foundation for students to engage with the readings and frame their work as inquiry. Using a conversational style and accessible examples, the authors cover such topics as the diversity of language and writing practices, what genres are and how writers depend on them, principles of rhetorical reading, and guidelines for conducting primary research on writing.
A new threshold concept, “rhetorical choices shape worlds,” focuses on how rhetorical practices have significant impacts on inclusion, equity, and justice (Chapter 6). An entirely new set of readings for Chapter 6 helps students understand and consider the implications of rhetorical theory.
New readings throughout Part Two reflect contemporary uses of writing in the world. Among them are new pieces on the nature of audience in online commenting, the daily literacy practices of multilingual writers, online advocacy for people with autism, and language use in reporting about different communities.
Join the movement that is transforming First-Year Composition
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.Success Stories
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Elizabeth Wardle; Doug Downs | Fifth Edition | ©2023 | ISBN:9781319496890
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MPS Order Search Tool (MOST) is a web-based purchase order tracking program that allows customers to view and track their purchases. No registration or special codes needed! Just enter your BILL-TO ACCT # and your ZIP CODE to track orders.
Canadian Stores: Please use only the first five digits/letters in your zip code on MOST.
Visit MOST, our online ordering system for booksellers: https://tracking.mpsvirginia.com/Login.aspx
Learn more about our Bookstore programs here: https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/contact-us/booksellers
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Our courses currently integrate with Canvas, Blackboard (Learn and Ultra), Brightspace, D2L, and Moodle. Click on the support documentation below to find out more details about the integration with each LMS.
Integrate Macmillan courses with Blackboard
Integrate Macmillan courses with Canvas
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If you’re a verified instructor, you can request a free sample of our courseware, e-book, or print textbook to consider for use in your courses. Only registered and verified instructors can receive free print and digital samples, and they should not be sold to bookstores or book resellers. If you don't yet have an existing account with Macmillan Learning, it can take up to two business days to verify your status as an instructor. You can request a free sample from the right side of this product page by clicking on the "Request Instructor Sample" button or by contacting your rep. Learn more.
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-
-
Sometimes also referred to as a spiral-bound or binder-ready textbook, loose-leaf textbooks are available to purchase. This three-hole punched, unbound version of the book costs less than a hardcover or paperback book.
-
-
-
Achieve (full course) includes our complete e-book, as well as online quizzing tools, multimedia assets, and iClicker active classroom manager.
Most Achieve Essentials courses do not include our e-books and adaptive quizzing.
Visit our comparison table for details: https://www.macmillanlearning.com/college/us/digital/achieve/compare
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Achieve (full course) includes our complete e-book, as well as online quizzing tools, multimedia assets, and iClicker active classroom manager.
Achieve Read & Practice only includes our e-book and adaptive quizzing, and does not include instructor resources and assignable assessments. Read & Practice does integrate with LMS.
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We can help! Contact your representative to discuss your specific needs for your course. If our off-the-shelf course materials don’t quite hit the mark, we also offer custom solutions made to fit your needs.
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Writing about Writing
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.
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