Lillis Theresa. The Sociolinguistics of Writing

Edinburgh University Press, 2013. — 192 p. — (Edinburgh Sociolinguistics). — ISBN 0748637486, 978-0-7486-3748-5, 978-0-7486-3750-8, 978-0-7486-3749-2, 978-0-7486-7751-1, 978-0-7486-7750-4.Brings the study of writing to the heart of sociolinguistic inquiryThis book puts writing at the centre of sociolinguistic inquiry drawing on a range of academic fields including New Literacy Studies, semiotics, genre studies, stylistics and new rhetoric. The key question the book explores is- what do we mean by 'writing' in the 21 century?Using examples from across a range of contexts the book argues that writing, involving both old and new technologies, is a pervasive and complex communicative feature of contemporary life.The book is organised around the following areas: The multimodal nature of writing The verbal dimension to writing. Writing as everyday practice. Writing as a differentiated semiotic and social resource. Writing as the inscription of identity A range of analytic tools for analysing writing as text and practice are illustrated including genre, register, discourse and metaphor, as well as notions which emphasise the mobile potential of writing such as genre chains, networks, literacy brokers and text trajectories. This book seeks to redress the neglect of writing in the field of sociolinguistics by introducing readers to the nature and consequences of what it means to do writing in a globalised world.Writing in sociolinguisticsSpoken language as the object of the sociolinguistic gaze
Key principles in sociolinguistics
The importance of the social
The empirical study of naturally occurring language
Everyday language as worthy of study
Variety as a core dimension to language
The position(ing) of writing in sociolinguistics
Standardisation and codification
Speech and writing in binary opposition
The acceptable site for ‘closet prescriptivism’?
Legitimising writing as an object of sociolinguistic inquiry
The ethnographic pull in sociolinguistics
Background and aims of this book
Overview of the book
Notes
The question of modeWhat’s in a mode?
Writing as inscription
Writing as verbal
Writing as material
Writing as technologies
Writing as visual
Writing as spatial vi The Sociolinguistics of Writing
Writing and other modal dimensions
Modes in practice: an example from geosemioticsNotes
Writing as verbalApproaches to text analysis: content, form, function
Content analysis
Form–functional analysis
Layering function onto form
Collapsing the form function dichotomy
Elevating form over function
Traditions of written text analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Rhetoric and new rhetoric
Stylistics
Contrastive rhetorics
Typification and genreNotes
Writing as everyday practiceWhat counts as literacy? What counts as writing?
Writing as ordinary
A social practice perspective
Theoretical and empirical tools for exploring writing as social practice
Who are writers? The current growth in writing activity
Using old and new writing technologies: an example of popular political activity
Writing as differentially evaluated resource: the case of formal schooling
A note on the challenges of description
The question of literacy
The question of languageNotes
Resources, networks and trajectoriesResources for writing: use and re-use
Communities, networks and the clustering of resources
Communities – speech, discourse and practice
Identifying clusters of resources
Networks and brokers
The portability and mobility of writing
Centring institutions, text trajectories and the question of uptake
Seeking asylum (Blommaert 2005)
Writing for academic publication (Lillis and Curry 2010)
Medical certification processes in nineteenth-century England
(Berkenkotter and Hanganu-Bresch 2011)Notes
Identity, inscription and voiceWhy focus on identity?
Writing as identity work
The social structuring of opportunities for writing
Habitus and writing practices
Resources for writing inscribed with particular identities
An example of a centripetal resource: essayist literacy
Regulation and agency
Strongly regulated writing spaces
Weakly regulated writing spaces
Ownership and becoming: the material resources for identity work in writingNotes
Theorising writing-reading-texts: domains and framesConceptualising what writers do: different approaches to writersreaders-texts
Poetic-aesthetic
Transactional-rationalist
Process-expressionist
Socio-cognitive
Social semiotic
Socio-discursive
Social practice
Participatory culture
Recognition and evaluation of writing: domains and frames
Shifting the frame: the aesthetics of routine writing
Student writing
Workplace writingNotes viii The Sociolinguistics of Writing
ConclusionsA summary of key points in this book
The question of function
The question of value and evaluation
The question of boundaries
Future research