Unfinished Business: Thoughts on the Past, Present, Future, and Nurturing of Homo Scribens

By Charles Bazerman
Copy edited by Karen P. Peirce. Designed by Mike Palmquist.

CoverIn Unfinished Business, Charles Bazerman considers long-standing puzzles in writing studies, from the most fundamental ideas about humans as writers and writing as constituting modern society to the most practical issues of curriculum and teaching. Together, the chapters provide a broad vision of the importance, role, consequences, and means of writing. The opening cluster of chapters places Homo sapiens’ capacity to write within the biological and cultural evolutionary arc. The second cluster of chapters focuses on how writing has extended and transformed our knowledge with major consequences for us as societies and individuals. The third cluster considers how we go about teaching this increasingly important skill that gives people voice in the literate world. The fourth reflects on the values and ethical concerns that pervade the practice and teaching of writing. In his final chapter, Bazerman speculates about where writing and writing instruction may go in the rapidly changing future.

Table of Contents

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Front Matter

Introduction

Section I. How Evolution Produced Writing Humans and How Writing Humans Remade Their World

Chapter 1. The Peculiar Emergence of Homo Scribens

Chapter 2. Communication Within and Beyond the Skin Barrier

Chapter 3. Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres

Chapter 4. The Writing of Social Organization and the Literate Situating of Cognition: Extending Goody’s Social Implications of Writing

Chapter 5. Revisiting the Early Uses of Writing in Society Building: Cuneiform Culture and the Chinese Imperium

Section 2. Writing and Knowledge

Chapter 6. Local and Distant Knowledges, Local and Distant Minds

Chapter 7. What Literate Societies See: The Methodical Gaze of Genres

Chapter 8. Making the World Scientifically Thinkable: Inscribing Experience Methodically and Its Cognitive Consequences

Chapter 9. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer: The Growing, Unsatisfiable Hunger of Connection

Section 3. Nurturing Homo Scribens: Puzzles of Writing Instruction

Chapter 10. Writers Use Language, but the Teaching of Writing Requires More than the Teaching of Language

Chapter 11. The Value of Empirically Researching a Practical Art

Chapter 12. A? Developmental? Path? To? Text? Quality?

Chapter 13. What Does a Model Model? And for Whom?

Section 4. The Ethics and Values of Writing

Chapter 14. Equity Means Having Full Voice in the Conversation

Chapter 15. Schooling for Life, All Lives: Opportunity, Dilemma, Challenge, Critical Thought

Chapter 16. Paying the Rent: Languaging Particularity and Novelty

Chapter 17. Reproduction, Critique, Expression, and Cooperation: The Writer’s Dance in an Intertextual World

Chapter 18. The Ethical Poetry of Academic Writing

Section 5. Guesses at Unknown Futures

Chapter 19. Looking Backwards Towards the Future

About the Author

Charles Bazerman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is founder and former chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research and former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has been a visiting professor in Portugal, Denmark, the Czech Republic, France, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and the US. His books include How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became, A Rhetoric of Literate Action, A Theory of Literate Action, The Languages of Edison’s Light, Shaping Written Knowledge, The Informed Writer, The Handbook of Research on Writing, What Writing Does and How It Does It, and Lifespan Development of Writing Abilities.

Publication Information: Bazerman, Charles. (2024). Unfinished Business: Thoughts on the Past, Present, Future, and Nurturing of Homo Scribens. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2024.2340

Digital Publication Date: June 21, 2024
Print Publication Date: TBD

ISBN: 978-1-64215-234-0 (PDF) | 978-1-64215-235-7 (ePub) | 978-1-64642-686-7 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.37514/PRA-B.2024.2340

Contact Information:
Charles Bazerman: bazerman@education.ucsb.edu

Practices & Possibilities

Series Editors: Aimee McClure, Clarke University; Kelly Ritter, Georgia Institute of Technology; Aleashia Walton, University of Cincinnati; and Jagadish Paudel, University of Texas at El Paso

Acrobat Reader DownloadThis book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). It is also available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado.


Copyright © 2024 Charles Bazerman. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. 298 pages, with notes, illustrations, and bibliographies. This book is available in print from University Press of Colorado as well as from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Available in digital formats for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may not reproduce this book on another website. For permission requests and other questions, such as creating a translation, please contact the copyright holder.