"Kids Don't Come with Instruction Manuals": A Mother Writing to Learn Across Her Lifespan

Literacy in Composition Studies May 2025 RSS

"Kids Don't Come with Instruction Manuals": A Mother Writing to Learn Across Her Lifespan

D'Orazio, Anna

Abstract

In this article, I focus on an everyday writer, my mother, engaging in self-sponsored writing to learn (WTL) activities across her lifespan. Focusing specifically on her personal journals and her accounts of her longitudinal WTL trajectory, I trace the learning pathways she took to develop her identity as a mother across her life. Writing was a benefit to her everyday life given, as she puts it, there is no set “instruction manual” for how to parent. Additionally, I trace the “multidirectional” nature of her literacy by investigating how literacy learning circulates given Jane’s intent to pass her WTL journals down to her children as a text to learn from when they become parents (Lee). In making my argument, I extend conversations happening in our field about writing and learning as a lifewide activity. I emphasize the importance writing has on identity development and learning across one’s life and, as such, this article helps literacy studies, lifespan development of writing studies, and motherhood rhetorical studies gauge the vast ways writers write to learn outside of formal schooling. 

Journal: Literacy in Composition Studies
Published: 2025-05-29
Topics: literacy studies writing across the curriculum race and writing

Citation Context

Citation data not yet available for this article.

Citation data is not available for Literacy in Composition Studies. This journal's publisher does not deposit reference lists with CrossRef.