Written Communication Jul 2010

Tracing Trajectories of Practice: Repurposing in One Student’s Developing Disciplinary Writing Processes

Kevin Roozen Auburn University

Abstract

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte’s (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities repurpose, or reuse and transform, extradisciplinary practices. Based on text collection and practice-oriented retrospective accounts of one writer’s processes for a number of textual activities, the article argues that the writer’s developing disciplinary writing process as a graduate student in English literature is mediated by practices she repurposed from previous engagements with keeping a prayer journal as a member of a church youth group and generating visual designs for an undergraduate graphic arts class. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the discursive practices persons recruit and reinvigorate across multiple engagements with reading, writing, making, and doing.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2010-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088310373529
Open Access
Closed
Topics
writing across the curriculum multimodality

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (9)

  1. Lindenman et al. (2024)
    A Taxonomy of Life Writing: Exploring the Functions of Meaningful Self-Sponsore…
    Written Communication
  2. Ware (2022)
    “God’s Absence During Trauma Took Its Toll”: Dialogic Tracing of Literate Activ…
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  3. Smith et al. (2021)
    Writing Transfer, Integration, and the Need for the Long View
    College Composition and Communication
  4. Piña (2020)
    Who Cares if Johnny Writes with a Pencil? Or, a Hauntological Historiography of…
    Rhetoric Review
  5. Dickinson (2020)
    Points of Departure: Rethinking Student Source Use and Writing Studies Research…
    Technical Communication Quarterly
Show all 9 →
  1. Durst (2019)
    Disciplinarity and Literate Activity in Civil and Environmental Engineering: A …
    Written Communication
  2. Olsen et al. (2018)
    Examining Intertextual Connections in Written Arguments: A Study of Student Wri…
    Written Communication
  3. Lockhart et al. (2016)
    The Critical Place of Reading in Writing Transfer (and Beyond)
    Pedagogy
  4. Dryer (2013)
    Scaling Writing Ability
    Written Communication

Cites in this index (14)

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    Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and “Deep Theorizing”
    Written Communication
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    Parallels in Academic and Nonacademic Discursive Styles
    Written Communication
Show all 14 →
  1. Warren (2006)
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    Written Communication
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