Writing Language: Composition, the Academy, and Work

Bruce Horner

doi:10.3390/h6020011

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.

Highlights

Composition has long carried a vocational charge within the university: to provide students with the skill to produce writing appropriate to meet the demands of academic disciplinary coursework and future employment
Precisely because that support is based on what appears to be a purely vocational, if not remedial, need, composition as a field of study carries with it the stigma of lacking legitimate academic disciplinary status (Crowley 1998)
The assumption has long been that students admitted to postsecondary education should already know how to write, and that composition courses have at best a remedial, and ideally temporary, function in teaching students what, by rights, they should already know how to do and that, is a relatively simple, even mechanical matter

Summary

Introduction

Composition has long carried a vocational charge within the university: to provide students with the skill to produce writing appropriate to meet the demands of academic disciplinary coursework and future employment.

Results

Conclusion