Abstract

Current social perspectives on writing and disciplinary enculturation are generally grounded in theories of discourse communities. Although assumptions underlying these theories have been seriously questioned, few studies of situated writing have applied alternate theories. In this article, I explore a sociohistoric notion of disciplinarity in a case study of how a sociology student's dissertation prospectus is negotiated in a graduate seminar. A microhistorical narrative of a response episode in the seminar and subsequent textual revision is contextualized in histories of local activity. Analysis of the seminar response foregrounds emergent, nonlinear, discursively heterogeneous practices of disciplinary sense-making. Analysis of the text foregrounds practices whereby situated histories of textual production and reception are transformed into purified representations of the discipline and the author. Finally, the analysis details how the disciplinary work of revision in this setting was socially distributed and interactively achieved.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
1994-10-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088394011004003
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (14)

  1. Written Communication
  2. Written Communication
  3. Written Communication
  4. Written Communication
  5. Written Communication
Show all 14 →
  1. Written Communication
  2. Assessing Writing
  3. Pedagogy
  4. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  5. Written Communication
  6. Written Communication
  7. Written Communication
  8. Written Communication
  9. Written Communication

References (85) · 6 in this index

  1. Representation in scientific practice
  2. The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin
  3. Speech genres and other late essays
  4. Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science
  5. Constructing experience
Show all 85 →
  1. Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines
  2. Written Communication
  3. Research in the Teaching of English
  4. Textual dynamics of the professions
  5. PRE/TEXT
  6. Dissertation Abstracts International
  7. Literacy as involvement: The acts of readers, writers, and texts
  8. Written Communication
  9. Written Communication
  10. Diversity as resource: Redefining cultural literacy
  11. Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy
  12. The acquisition of written language: Revision and response
  13. annual meeting of the American Association of Educational Research
  14. Academic literacies: The public and private discourse of university students
  15. Written Communication
  16. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography
  17. 10.1086/227835
  18. Changing order
  19. Writing as social action
  20. 10.1037/0021-843X.85.2.186
  21. Invisible colleges: Diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities
  22. The social construction of written communication
  23. The practice of everyday life
  24. Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomena
  25. 10.2307/356600
  26. 10.2307/357381
  27. The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language
  28. Response to student writing
  29. Studies in ethnomethodology
  30. Local knowledge
  31. Works and lives: The anthropologist as author
  32. Central problems in social theory: Action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis
  33. Opening Pandora's box: A sociological analysis of scientists' discourse
  34. Forms of talk
  35. Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon
  36. Writing the social text: Poetics and politics in social science discourse
  37. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives
  38. 10.2307/358177
  39. 10.1017/S0047404500009039
  40. Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms
  41. Language acquisition: Models and methods
  42. Foundations in sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach
  43. Issues in Applied Linguistics
  44. 10.1016/0898-5898(92)90008-K
  45. Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice
  46. The manufacture of knowledge
  47. Narratives of human evolution
  48. Essays on classical rhetoric and modern discourse
  49. We have never been modern
  50. Laboratory life: The social construction of scientific facts
  51. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation
  52. Invention as a social act
  53. Problems in the development of mind
  54. Written Communication
  55. 10.1080/01638538709544681
  56. Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development
  57. Writing biology: Texts in the social construction of scientific knowledge
  58. What writers know: The language, process, and structure of written discourse
  59. Writing and response: Theory, practice, and research
  60. Configurations
  61. 10.1177/092137408900200206
  62. 10.1080/01638539209544801
  63. Research on writing
  64. 10.1016/S0140-1971(87)80086-6
  65. A sense of audience in written communication
  66. Written Communication
  67. Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy
  68. The conflict of interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics
  69. Similarity and analogical reasoning
  70. Executive control processes in reading
  71. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings
  72. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse
  73. Marxism and the philosophy of language
  74. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes
  75. Thinking and speech
  76. Thinking and writing in college: A naturalistic study of students in four disciplines
  77. Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action
  78. Promoting cognitive growth over the life span
  79. Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development
  80. Philosophical Investigations