Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text Edited By Charles Bazerman

 Reference Guides  Research outcomes and methods histories  Include various perspectives, often across disciplines  Apparatus include table of contents, often themed like anthologies and indexes for authors, citations and key words  In appearance, handbooks seem like multi-authored anthologies with editorial introductions. One specific distinction is that these collections include commissioned essays that attempt to summarize and look forward (inform future agenda) rather than represent a particular history looking at past publications (which may represent a future agenda in a different way).

There are a number of Handbooks on Research in Writing published in the last 5 years.

 Articles seem hybrid genres of literature reviews and arguments. In particular, because the Bazerman text focuses on multiple disciplinary histories, the articles seem to start from a wide swath and approach an argumentative frame by narrative focus.

 (on literacy studies) “In such a reading-focused approach to understanding literacy, our most active role is to criticize and distance ourselves from texts we question or to read creatively in order to appropriate texts for our own ends...A world in which we read but don’t write is a world in which we do not have primal agency” (1)  “We hope the broad representations in this volume will foster even more interdisciplinary, international, and wide-ranging awareness of the many dimensions of writing research, and that future volumes will be able to reach far beyond the attempts here” (3).

 Prior and Lunsford’s article begins by expanding the scope of historical analysis of writing beyond the Euro- American domains to include broader anthropological space.  They then define locations for inquiry, including the technologies of writing, reflection, authorship, and translation.  Finally, although they locate a “foundation” for writing studies in applied linguistics and composition studies, they press for a more inclusive understanding of “textual processes rather than texts” (92)

 Broadly describes three facets of social economy writing informs:  Development of “objects, practices, and institutions” that “enable... economic activity” (i.e.. Goody, Renaissance debt payments)  Modern theories of economics and the discourses they perpetuate and/or construct (Marshall or Keyes)  Explore how the science of the economy as it is written and theorized in writing has influenced analytical and written practices of “policymaking” and “individual action.”  Then narrows to an argument about writing in economic science as a necessary and important analytical tool for theorists, business persons, and household economists (seems to imply a cognitive meaning-making strategy for social interaction with a market system)

Teaching of Writing and Diversity: Access, Identity and Achievement  Albertini attempts to define “diversity” broadly, drawing on taxonomies of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and ability, to give an overview of the landscape of writing studies that take up these identities of writers  In doing so, he highlights some of the relevant debates of the field, for example the degree to which students from diverse backgrounds “can or even should learn a mainstream discourse” (Gee-Delpit / identity conflict-dis/empowerment)  Refocuses the challenge for writing teachers to “allow each student to express his or her unique view in writing that is comprehensible and effective for the reader.”  As with Prior and Lunsford, the research Albertini includes and the ways he connects them makes an argument that is more than summative (pointing, for example to ways diverse identities may exist in the classroom free from conflict).

Identity and the Writing of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students  Asks if “we [can] do a better job of supporting and affirming students’ identities of themselves as writers and whether affirmations lead to improved writing for students from diverse backgrounds.”  Ball and Ellis nod to research on identity from anthropology, psychology, education, and education but quickly zero in on how society shapes the self and social behavior (500).  Draw on Gee’s assertion that identity is not “an internal state; rather it is the recognition of being ‘a certain kind of person in a given context’” (501) to assert identity is valuable lens for understanding writing and writers in context and zero in on studies of writing that focus on connections between writing identity (of which they found few, notably Ivanic’s ( 1998) notion of “socioculturally shaped possibilities for selfhood”)  Looks at various studies that show discourses and writing practices are socially embedded and writers seem to excel best when they can draw on home / community practices / knowledges  Focuses on K-12  Narrow to the argument “culturally and linguistically diverse students...do not self-identify as academically successful writers” and call for more research in the area that specifically looks at intersections between writing and identity.

 Grammar, the Sentence, and Traditions in Linguistic Analysis  “The word grammar can refer to the features of the language being studies and to the theoretical construct that informs the study, as researchers use the abstract constructs of grammatical theory in analyzing the language patterns in particular texts. The term grammar, rather than syntax, is used throughout this chapter as the term syntax is associated with formal linguistics, where it is a level of analysis that contrasts with morphology, semantics and so on…”  Schleppengrell’s piece defines the broader category as grammar and filters that construct through language studies (including brief accounts of writing and linguistics) to focus the analysis to sentence, clause, nominalizations, and the themes, subjects, and interpersonal relations they construct.  Conclusion notes the growth in corpus linguistics and functional linguistic approaches and argues “knowledge and information are constructed through deployment of linguistic features that are functional for meaning making in particular contexts, and approaches to the analysis of writing that recognize the complexity with which linguistic features interact in the construction of meaning...”

 Bazerman’s collection seems to show different ways of conceptualizing writing as a social, cognitive, textual, interpersonal, and individual practice. As such, the focus is not solely on the writing for academic purposes as we have described it in our class (even as we describe our own approaches as interdisciplinary.) This approach is, in some ways, extradisciplinary, looking outside the camps of disciplines for histories, arcs of meaning, and examples of research and writing ‘in the act’ of many spheres

 Given this broad, social, and historical approach to capturing a history of writing, it might be interesting to think of how research of writing itself frames and freezes snapshots of activity, splicing and parsing and connecting those snapshots within other pieces of writing. Is that construction, co-construction, or just the process of writing itself?