The End of Composition Studies

4. Writing as a Social Practice

77 4 WritingasaSocialPractice IN THE LAST TEN OR FIFTEEN YEARS, it has become something of a commonplace in composition studies to argue that writing is in some sense “social.” Various composition theorists have called writing “a social activity ” or “a social practice”; they have argued that writing is “socially constructed ” or “social-epistemic,” to name a few varieties of the term. However , none of these conceptions of writing is very well developed. I have argued thus far that we seem to learn to write primarily by immersion in a variety of literate social contexts, that much of what we know about writing is tacit, an internalization of our interaction with our environment . It seems reasonable, then, that understanding the nature of our interaction with the “social” would help us a great deal in developing our understanding of the nature of writing and how we learn to write. Unfortunately , the very terms that we use to talk about the “social”—context, socialization , discourse communities—are also fraught with difficulty. In this chapter, I would like to briefly survey the way theorists who study writing, or literacy more generally, talk about writing as being social, and then I would like to explore the difficulties of conceptualizing what we mean by the terms “social” and “discourse community.” The Concept of the“Social”in Composition Studies Of course, writing is obviously social in the sense that we share a language with others, and we share a common set of conventions with which we write certain kinds of discourse. In addition, for most discourse we often write to or for others: writing is social in the sense that it is addressed to audiences . And writing is social in the sense that as children we develop our 78 Conceptual Limits ability to use language in conjunction with others. As children develop their speaking and writing, their language “gradually approximates”the language of adult or mature speakers. Most scholars in the field of composition studies who promote the idea of writing as a social practice develop these commonsense notions into larger, more comprehensive theories. For example, Marilyn M. Cooper and Michael Holzman refer to writing as a social “activity.” They distinguish their sense of writing as a social activity from Saussure’s sense of language as a “communal product”; they want to emphasize writing not as “a common system through which individual minds can communicate” but rather as “a real interaction among social groups and individuals” (ix–x). In addition, Cooper and Holzman distinguish their understanding of writing as a social activity from other theories that emphasize that writing necessarily involves audiences. Rather than focus on the way writers conceptualize readers, which makes writing more of a cognitive process than a social one, Cooper and Holzman prefer to think of an audience as“always present to writers—real people we know and talk with and do other things with”:“writing is a way of interacting with others—a social activity”; “it is part of the way in which some people live in the world” (x, xii). Cooper and Holzman cite approvingly the notions of language given by Wilhelm von Humboldt—“language develops only in social intercourse” (; qtd. in Cooper and Holzman x)—and by M. A. K. Halliday—“language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people’s lives” (Language –; qtd. in Cooper and Holzman x). Cooper and Holzman’s distinctions are interesting but quite problematic . It is not at all clear what a “real interaction” between a writer and a social group is, or in what sense an audience is “always present” to a writer, as we have seen in the theories of the composing process promoted by Martin Nystrand in the previous chapter. Writing is also considered by various composition theorists to be “social -epistemic.” Although the scholars and researchers who espouse this view are many and varied, they may be fairly represented by James Berlin (for a list of possible proponents of social-epistemic rhetoric, see Berlin, “Rhetoric” ). Berlin first uses the term“epistemic”to refer to a pedagogical theory he otherwise calls“the New Rhetoric.”According to the theorists of the New Rhetoric, writing is conditioned by language and its various forms and the social conditions in which that language arose. As a result, Berlin suggests that not only a particular rhetoric or rhetorical theory but all writing, indeed all uses of language, are epistemic: truth is always truth for someone standing in relation to others...