David R. Russell – författare

To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum, explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding of public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.

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 important, the educators of leaders in these activity fields. This collection presents landmarks showing where the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movements have gone. They have opened up a number of prospects that were impossible to see when rhetoric and composition confined their gaze to relatively few discursive activities. This suggests that the rhetorical landscape is becoming more complex and interesting, as well as more responsive to life in the complex, differentiated societies that have emerged in the last few centuries. This volume will reveal to scholars and researchers a range of possibilities for the study of disciplinary discourse and its teaching, and suggest to them new prospects for the future -- and for the better.

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 important, the educators of leaders in these activity fields. This collection presents landmarks showing where the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movements have gone. They have opened up a number of prospects that were impossible to see when rhetoric and composition confined their gaze to relatively few discursive activities. This suggests that the rhetorical landscape is becoming more complex and interesting, as well as more responsive to life in the complex, differentiated societies that have emerged in the last few centuries. This volume will reveal to scholars and researchers a range of possibilities for the study of disciplinary discourse and its teaching, and suggest to them new prospects for the future -- and for the better.

Writing As a Human Activity offers a collection of original essays that attempt to account for Charles Bazerman’s shaping influence on the field of writing studies. Through scholarly engagement with his ideas, the 16 chapters—written by authors from Asia, Europe, North America, and South America—address Bazerman’s foundational scholarship on academic and scientific writing, genre theory, activity theory, writing research, writing across the curriculum, writing pedagogy, the sociology of knowledge, new media and technology, and international aspects of writing. Collectively, the authors use Bazerman’s work as a touchstone to consider contemporary contexts of writing as a human activity.