Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Public and Private Lives

Preface

preface I began my career as a scholar and teacher of the history of writing and literacy thinking that I understood what writing was—where it came from, what roles it plays in our lives, what changes it has undergone over the millennia. But the reading and research I have done over the course of my career reveal just how naïve my early assessment was. Writing, so ubiquitous that to many it is as invisible as the air we breathe, began to slither out of my grasp, growing increasingly complex, difficult to define, sometimes deeply mysterious . One of the Western world’s oldest technologies, writing—like the art of rhetoric to which it is often linked—is plastic, endlessly adaptable to new situations, challenges, and opportunities, and thus difficult to pin down, to know with certainty. This adaptability marks the power of writing, a power that is understood by many in almost visceral ways. For some twenty-five years, I’ve been asking students, colleagues, and any other audiences I came across to capture their very earliest memories of writing, and over the years I have found that these memories fall predictably into two categories. For most people, the earliest memories of writing have to do with naming the self, with writing one’s name. In one magical moment, a child writes, scratches, paints, or otherwise makes marks in the shape of letters that form her name, and there it is, a representation of the child that is somehow separate from but deeply connected to her. That child has now made her mark on the world, literally changing the world in so doing. So the most prevalent early memory of writing links it to personal efficacy and power. But the second most prevalent memory of writing—the one reported to me almost as often as the first—links writing with pain, punishment, or humiliation: being made to write “I will not do X” a thousand times turns up in many stories, as do other examples of writing used as a form of punishment. As one who loves words and loves writing them, coming to terms with this second memory of writing was difficult. Yet this negative power of writing is very real: in addition to serving as a form of punishment, think of all the ways in which writing can circumscribe and limit our lives. Elspeth Stuckey details some of the ways in which school writing scars young learners in The Violence of Literacy; in a doctoral dissertation on “Forms of Submission,” Ebony Coletu traces the effect of welfare applications and other forms of writing on the lives of those in crisis who need to use them. And students instinctively know that they are affected in often dramatic ways by writing—on the sat, act, gre, lsat, mcat and countless other examinations that can determine the choices they will have later in life. Teachers and students of writing need to be aware of these two memories of writing and to be aware, as well, that all writers struggle to write rather than to be written by other people or institutions. Far from a mere tool for transcribing thoughts, writing always has the potential to be epistemic, to create new knowledge—which can then be used for good or ill. For me, then, the stakes of writing and of teaching—of professing —writing are always high. Momentarily, when I got my first xii ~ Preface computer in 1984, I thought these stakes might be lowered: surely this newest technology of writing might take over for me, producing writing for me, perhaps even teaching writing for me. Perhaps under these new circumstances, writing would become less important, more like the simple set of skills by which it is often defined. Now we know, of course, that the digital revolution has made writing more pervasive and potentially more powerful than ever, and it has opened the doors to writing for many (anyone today can be an “author,” for example) even as it has worked to limit access to many others. In the age of the Net and Web, people are writing more than ever before, and what they are writing can be read (and responded to) by millions within only a few seconds. In short, changes in technology have changed the nature, status, and scope of writing in such profound ways that they call for a new definition of writing. Look...