Place-Based Genre Writing as Critical Expressivist Practice

David Seitz, Wright State University - Main Campus

Copyright © 2014 Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 United States License. 322 pages, with notes, illustrations, and bibliographies.

Abstract

In response to students’ changing literacy practices within the digital age in contrast to the traditional expectations of academic print literacy, many first year writing programs have rejected expressivist approaches to teaching academic reading and writing. Instead, these programs tend to emphasize rhetorical analyses of written and visual texts, especially in the first course of an academic writing sequence. As economist Robert Reich pointed out, our global knowledge economy requires this focus on analysis. He identified the need for symbolic analysts who “wield equations, formulae, analogies, models, and construct categories and metaphors in order to create possibilities for reinterpreting and rearranging” the deluge of textual and visual data (quoted in Johnson-Eilola, 2004, p. 229).