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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.

Deborah Brandt coments on Kevin Roozen and Karen Lunsford's insightful examination of empirical studies of college and adult writing published in NCTE journals over the last 100 years.

Drawing on her interviews with professional ghostwriters who work primarily in organizations, the author examines what this practice implies about society’s current attitudes toward authorship, written work, and literacy in general. She also examines the ethical arguments that various critics of ghostwriting have made.

This article seeks to explore the influence of the knowledge economy on the status of writing and literacy. It inquires into what happens to writers and their writing when texts serve as the chief commercial products of an organization—when such high-stakes factors as corporate reputation, client base, licensing, competitive advantage, growth, and profit rely on what and how people write. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 individuals employed in writing-intensive positions, it examines the organization of workplaces for the production of texts, the work of writers as mediational means within the workplace, the growing presence of regulatory controls on the production of writing, and the ways that demands for innovation and change affect writers and their writing. This is an exploratory installment in a larger project that seeks to situate the rise of mass writing in the United States, since about 1960, not only as an economic phenomenon but as a new development in the history of literacy with serious cultural, political, social, and personal implications.

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Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

The author explores how World War II changed the rationale for mass literacy in the United States from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative. She suggests that we are in a similar period of reevaluation today, and that, if the capacity to fuse older and newer ideologies is at its limit, the school may find itself running behind or even against the dominant cultural imperatives for literacy in a new world order.

This book traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations of Americans and how they have responded to rapid changes in the meaning and methods of literacy learning in their society. Drawing on more than 80 life histories of Americans from all walks of life, the book addresses critical questions facing public education at the twenty-first century: What role does economic change play in creating inequality in access and reward for literacy? What is the human impact of the economy's growing reliance on the literacy skills of workers? This book gets beyond the usual laments about the crisis in literacy to offer an often surprising look into the ways that literacy is lived in America.

Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

In this essay I set out a case for why the concept of sponsorship is so richly suggestive for exploring economies of literacy and their effects. Then, through use of extended case examples, I demonstrate the practical application of this approach for interpreting current conditions of literacy teaching and learning, including persistent stratification of opportunity and escalating standards for literacy achievement. A final section addresses implications for the teaching of writing. (Brandt 167).

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This article explores the uses of ethnomethodology in developing a robust sociocognitive theory of writing. Ethnomethodology, a radical movement in sociology that studies people's sense-making practices, has some parallel interests with cognitive-process research in composition. At the same time, because ethnomethodology is attuned to how sense-making involves organizing social structure, it also shares parallel interests with social-constructionist thought in composition. This article uses ethnomethodological perspectives to translate the language of Flower and Hayes's cognitive theory of writing into a more thoroughly social vocabulary as a way of articulating the role of social context and social structure in individual acts of writing.

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.

This essay reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannen's (1985) distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Rather than seeing message in tension with involvement, this query treats message as an embodiment of involvement. Cohesion particularly is treated as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship, an outgrowth of a thickening commitment to a mutual orientation. Speculations are offered for rethinking what is called “literate orientation.”

Contradictory approaches to context and written language have clouded understanding of the nature and role of context in composition. This article treats writing within a larger framework of context and language use in general to suggest important interrelationships among writer, context, and text. Implications for writing-process research are examined.