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Writing about Writing

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Product Overview

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.

Students are prepared in Part One to engage with the readings in Part Two. The Part One chapters explain the value of investigating writing, introduce threshold concepts and the notion of transfer, detail the elements of genre and rhetorical reading, and offer a guide for conducting writing studies research at a level appropriate for undergraduates. A new threshold concept, “Rhetorical choices shape worlds,” is supported by a new, more diverse and inclusive set of readings in Part Two. Writing about Writing is paired with Achieve, a powerful suite of tools that facilitate revision, reflection, and peer review and personalizes student progress.

Success Stories

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Prof. Kiandra Johnson, Spelman College

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Prof. Jennifer Duncan

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Content Material

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.

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.