Writing Language: Composition, the Academy, and Work

Abstract

This paper argues that while college composition courses are commonly charged with remediating students by providing them with the literacy skills they lack, they may instead be redefined as providing the occasion for rewriting language and knowledge. By bringing to the fore the dependence of language and knowledge on the labor of writing, a pedagogy of recursion, mediation, and translation of knowledge through writing and revision counters neoliberalism's commodification of knowledge and language, and offers an alternative justification for continuing education as the occasion for students to remediate language and knowledge through writing.

Workplace Writing in L2 Experiences Among Millennial Workforce: Learning to Write in English

“…In terms of writing in the workplace, the situated learning which was suggested by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1993). Writing scholars who represented the of situated learning deflates the idea of general writing skills to be transferred to workplace-specific writing (Horner 2017). The proponents believe that learning happens in real context.…”

Privatised Academic Writing: Reflections on Access, Knowledge, and Policy

“…Underlying my response is the importance of recognising the contribution made by all participants, students included, toward academic literacies development, understood as an ongoing project in which the public has a stake and for which it has a responsibility. The matter of granting public access to academic literacies is, from this perspective, not so much a matter of a public right to, or equality of distribution of, a known entity, but a matter of need-the need of the academy for the work students (and others) perform in sustaining and revising academic literacies and knowledge through their concrete labor, most often in the form of work with and on written language (Horner, 2017;Horner & Lu, 2014). While I do not see this perspective on academic literacies to be in conflict with Neculai's provocation, it seems to me to merit emphasis in countering a predominant view of higher education as something with which to 'gift' the public.…”