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Studies on writing development have grown in diversity and depth in recent decades, but remain fragmented along lines of theory, method, and age ranges or populations studied. Meaningful, competent writing performances that meet the demands of the moment rely on many kinds of well-practiced and deeply understood capacities working together; however, these capacities’ realization and developmental trajectories can vary from one individual to another. Without an integrated framework to understand lifespan development of writing abilities in its variation, high-stakes decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment are often made in unsystematic ways that may fail to support the development they are intended to facilitate; further, research may not consider the range of issues at stake in studying writing in any particular moment.To address this need and synthesize what is known about the various dimensions of writing development at different ages, the coauthors of this essay have engaged in sustained discussion, drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Drawing on research from different disciplinary perspectives, they propose eight principles upon which an account of writing development consistent with research findings could be founded. These principles are proposed as a basis for further lines of inquiry into how writing develops across the lifespan.

Charles Bazerman reminds us of the complexity of writing. He describes his own journey of disciplined study of writing as one that has necessarily been interdisciplinary, or more precisely, that has involved a series of different disciplinary engagements, each of which is aimed at illuminating some dimension of literate activity and its social consequences.

This is a written version of the address Charles Bazerman gave at the CCCC meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009.

Recent historical examinations of nonliterary, nontheoretical texts within their activity settings have aimed to identify the historically developed communicative and rhetorical resources currently available to writers and to reveal the dynamics of the formation, use, and evolution of those resources. These studies, in examining communal literate practices, combine theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns by building theories of the middle range. This methodological article elaborates how theories of the middle range can guide research through identifying interrelated levels of research questions (originating, specifying, and site specific) and identifying strategic research sites. This article further elaborates methods of finding, selecting, and analyzing relevant texts and placing them within appropriate social and historical contexts.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

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Genres, although aligning people to joint activity and joint attention, shape the substantive material or information represented within the bounded space of the text. Each genre creates a space that prompts the production of particular kinds of information to populate that space. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that mandated the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was invented out of a perceived social need for greater information about the effects of human activity on the environment. The EIS has since spawned a constellation of related genres, has created a large informational market to fulfill the requirements of these genres, and has led to a proliferation of information. The set of relations among genre, information, and activity found in this one sphere of environmental information are suggestive of how information is produced and used in generic forms.

Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. The authors begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText and then scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. They direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, the authors urge the continuing evolution of technologies of text.

Information is humanly created for human purposes in specific historical situations. This study examines how an anti-nuclear test activist group in the Cold War period, to foster public opposition to government policy, asserted an alternative understanding of information against centralized governmental definitions of information. Such citizen information, validated by citizen scientists to serve the needs and concerns of citizens, pervaded the antiwar, environmental, and consumer movements of the second half of the 20th century. An enthymematic analysis of the newsletter of the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee for Nuclear Information and successor journals reveals multiple assumptions embodied in beliefs and practices of citizen information. These beliefs and practices concern threats to everyday life, orientation toward threat-reducing action, large interested institutions that limit access to relevant information, science as an independent and objective source of information, and the responsibilities of a citizen to be informed.

When the New York Sun reported that Thomas Edison had solved the problem of incandescent lighting, that purported invention generated immense excitement across many segments of the American population. The letters sent to Edison in the days following the September 16, 1878, story reveal the many discursive worlds that Edison's work touched on and had meaning for. They indicate how a technological accomplishment is also a multiple, complex social and communicative accomplishment, creating place and meaning for the new technology within the many discursive systems by which people assign value, identify uses, and create goals incorporating the technology. Edison's ability to connect with each of these meaning systems paved the way for the development of the technology, providing financial and social resources for Edison that his competitors did not enjoy.

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Reading, as well as writing, is a constructive activity. Interviews and observations of research physicists reveal reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. These schema, or personal maps of the field, include not only consensual knowledge about the phenomena being discussed, but also perceptions as to the most promising lines of current work, methods that are most likely to produce good results, and personal knowledge about the other workers in the field. Schema thus are formed around the active research purposes of the reader. Equally, purposes are framed within the researcher's schematic understanding of the field. With schema and purposes evolving dialectically, texts are read, not as static arguments, but as part of the dynamic process of research activity.