A Theory of Literate Action makes a significant contribution to the field and enriches and deepens our perspectives on writing by drawing together such varied and wide-ranging approaches from social theory and the social sciences—from psychology, to phenomenology, to pragmatics—and demonstrating their relevance to writing studies.

Undertaken by one of the most learned and visionary scholars in the field, this work has a comprehensive and culminating quality to it, tracking major lines of insight into writing as a human practice and articulating the author's intellectual progress as a theorist and researcher across a career.

The Lifespan Development of Writing presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development at different ages from multiple, cross-disciplinary perspectives, including psychological, linguistic, sociocultural, and curricular.Although writing begins early in life and can develop well into adulthood, we know too little about how writing develops before, during, and after schooling, as well as too little about how an indi...

This reference guide traces the writing across the curriculum movement from its origins in British secondary education through its flourishing in American higher education and extension to American primary and secondary education.

What current theoretical frameworks inform academic and professional writing? What does research tell us about the effectiveness of academic and professional writing programs? What do we know about existing best practices? What are the current guidelines and procedures in evaluating a program’s effectiveness? What are the possibilities in regard to future research and changes to best practices in these programs in an age of accountability? Editors Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater b...

In What Writing Does and How It Does It, editors Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior offer a sophisticated introduction to methods for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices. This volume addresses a variety of approaches to analyzing texts, and considers the processes of writing, exploring textual practices and their contexts, and examining what texts do and how texts mean rather than what they mean. Included are traditional modes...

Traditions of Writing Research reflects the different styles of work offered at the Writing Research Across Borders conference. Organized by Charles Bazerman, one of the pre-eminent scholars in writing studies, the conference facilitated an unprecedented gathering of writing researchers. Representing the best of the works presented, this collection focuses solely on writing research, in its lifespan scope bringing together writing researchers interested in early childhood through ...

The authors report research that considers writing in all levels of schooling, in science, in the public sphere, and in the workplace, as well as the relationship among these various places of writing. The authors also consider the cultures of writing—among them national cultures, gender cultures, schooling cultures, scientific cultures, and cultures of the workplace.

Rhetoric, as a general teaching -- while preaching locality of action and guidelines for handling that locality -- has tended from the beginning to serve as a universality. It has offered a generalized techne with only limited categories, appropriate for all discursive situations, at least for those that were not excluded from the realm of rhetoric. Nonetheless, from its beginnings, rhetoric limited its interests to certain activity fields such as law, government, religion, and most import...

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South Am...