Bazerman - Handbook of Research on Writing

The last 30 years have produced a wide interdisciplinary inquiry into how people write, how we learn to write, under what conditions and for what purposes we write, what resources and technologies we use to write, how our current forms and practices of writing emerged within social history, and what impacts writing has had on society and the individual. This research has been interdisciplinary and broad-ranging, but until recently there has been little attempt to aggregate these many strands of research and bring them together into a common intellectual space. This volume is an attempt to sum up what we know about writing and the many ways we know about it.

This volume will be, I hope, of use and interest to all scholars and researchers of writing as well as to those just starting down the path of writing research. But I also hope this volume will be of interest and use to anyone who teaches writing or is just curious about writing. Writing is a powerful and complex technology that touches the lives of writers deeply, and affects the lives of all in contemporary society, but we have barely begun to perceive that power. The various chapters in this volume, in summing up our knowledge, deepen our experience and appreciation of writing in ways that will make us better teachers of writing as well as individual writersfor the knowledge here deepens our sense of what we do every time we write or attempt to expand a students capacity to write.

In commissioning the chapters of this volume and editing them, I have learned much more than I could have ever hoped to learn, for it has put me in contact with the experience and thought of some of the top scholars that have addressed every aspect of writing. The Advisory Board includes eminent researchers from many nations and many specialtieswith focus on all aspects of writing. All authors of the 37 chapters, chosen from an international range of eminent researchers, have been faithful to a charge to seek out relevant materials from diverse research traditions in all countries. Authors and board members come from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, typography, communication studies, linguistics, journalism, sociology, rhetoric, composition, law, medicine, education, history, and literary studies.

The volume is organized in five parts. Part I considers the history of writing as a set of intertwined technologiesof symbol system, of production and distribution, of graphic design, of the book, and of reflection on these technologies. Part II surveys from an historical and social perspective the many social domains within which writing has had tran formative effect and has become part of the cognitive and material infrastructureeconomy, law, government, knowledge, libraries, literature, journalism, professional work, and everyday life. Part III then considers writing instruction within the specialized institutions designed to teach people literacyconsidering schools within history and at all levels, as well as the preparation of writing teachers and practices of assessment. Part IV focuses on individuals as they develop as writers throughout their life span, how cognition, affect, and identity are engaged and influenced by writing, how communication disorders affect writing, and how multilinguality provides special conditions for writing development. Part V considers specifically textual elements that each writer must make choices about, from the sentence up through the larger structure of text organization and argument, through design issues facilitated by new writing technologies.