Naming What We Know: First Reading
>Author implies writing studies has been something that has been upcoming in the most recent 50 years.
>A lot of the problem was, what is the field of study really about, and they settled on: composition, rhetoric, and writing studies.
>"neutoric quest for certainty"
>Writing studies, informally, is like the study of how to form composed knowledge.
>A lot of what writing studies is about how people learn, which is deeply related to texts which we try to teach people.
>writing studies is important because of the innate relationship to all academic fields, since all people write.
>This book is a collaborative work of multiple people from different fields who are all composers of knowledge in some sense.
>This book is not the end all of how to write good composed knowledge, it is meant to be a compass to get people pointed in the right direction as well as inform people about the concepts that are being considered.
>Writing has always had multiple purposes, so writing something good, can vary depending on a lot of outlying factors, the time, the people, the material, etc.
Writing Studies as a Mode of Inquiry: Second Reading
>Miller starts off by clarifying what she means to talk about "Composition studies."
>She talks about how it is a separation between the material, and how the thing is actually written and presented.
>Barring anything about content, and solely about the vessel in which it lies in.
>"In this view, literate acts enable the always abstract language that is indistinguishable from the contexts it evokes."
>Authorizes relations between extant texts and the writing processes that produced them.
>Writing studies, however, can ally interesst in the motives, skill, and extended development of single writers with knowledge of regulated social expectations.
>So it seems the author separates composition and writing studies, where one is almost purely objective, and the other a little less objective and more considerate of outside forces.
>Says the modern discipline of English works under mistaken assumptions about historical examples of literary and other schooled writing.
>Author proposes a FULL investigation of "all the writing undertaken in a more generally defined context uncovers uneven, casual, peripheral, subsidiary, and egalitarian practices."
>Representing all people.
>"To move closer to our professional homes, in writing studies a student theme is not interesting as a historical instance of ability, of assigned topics, or of teachers' comments, unless we account for its archival locale."
>Examples: "To assert that these texts remain visibly composed, scholars
like Jean Ferguson Carr situate nineteenth-century domestic scrapbooks as homemade volumes whose female "keepers" write themselves into a particular cultural fiction: domestic bliss."
>Why Writing Studies? "As the recent archive also shows, if we claim expertise about relations between specific writers, their processes and their texts, we easily grow and successfully divert out-worn attempts to marginalize our teaching and research. This is the greatest benefit of writing studies to all: the provision of well-formed, vividly engaging information about how and to what far reaching ends people write and have written."
The Case for a Major in Writing Studies: The University of Minnesota Duluth: Third Reading
>"Within the larger umbrella of English studies, for example, Bazerman differentiates writing studies from literary studies: Writing studies differs from literary studies in part because it does not engage “the traditional historical work of rhetorical and literary studies in recovering, editing, and interpreting major texts” "
>This is an abstract that proposes the formation of the Major in Writing Studies
>WRIT 2506 Introduction to Writing Studies Considers writing itself as both a practice and an object of study. Drawing on composition, journalism, linguistics, literary studies, and rhetoric, the course offers a survey of historical, critical, and theoretical issues in writing studies. Writing assignments ask students to apply a writing studies framework to produce and analyze specific texts.
>Seems that Writing Studies and English department work together to regulate the MA.
>Writing Studies, as a disciplinary practice, may use methods that overlap those developed in literary studies—drawing on the same bodies of critical theory, for example. But those methods are put to different political, intellectual and cultural ends.
>Writing Studies doesn't suffer from "canonoia."
>Author continues on to differentiate WS from other fields that it might be mistaken for. Much like one of the other authors, writing studies needs to be differentiated from other fields.