Writing is . . .

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"The act of writing is a complex sociocognitive interaction with the world that entails, beyond mechanical control, such subtle practices as establishing and maintaining social positions, adapting to variable discursive conventions, and constructing ideas and relationships for oneself and others. It is not separate from one's life or from one's culture.

 

Our . . . responsibility then [is] to ensure not that students receive some essentially alien technology, some 'correct' set of language practices, in order to proceed through the university, but rather that they learn to use, with greater subtlety and control, the language they bring with them, adjusting the register, the cadences, the vocabulary, the social codes, the nuances, and the intellectual moves, as they confront the demands of writing" (240-41).

 

--Lil Brannon, "Dis(Missing) Compulsory First Year Composition," 

Reconceiving Writing: Rethinking Writing Instruction (1995)