Abstract

Current social perspectives on writing and disciplinary enculturation are generally grounded in theories of discourse communities. Although assumptions underlying these theories have been seriously questioned, few studies of situated writing have applied alternate theories. In this article, I explore a sociohistoric notion of disciplinarity in a case study of how a sociology student's dissertation prospectus is negotiated in a graduate seminar. A microhistorical narrative of a response episode in the seminar and subsequent textual revision is contextualized in histories of local activity. Analysis of the seminar response foregrounds emergent, nonlinear, discursively heterogeneous practices of disciplinary sense-making. Analysis of the text foregrounds practices whereby situated histories of textual production and reception are transformed into purified representations of the discipline and the author. Finally, the analysis details how the disciplinary work of revision in this setting was socially distributed and interactively achieved.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
1994-10-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088394011004003
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
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Citation context

Cited by in this index (18)

  1. Written Communication
  2. Journal of Writing Analytics
  3. Written Communication
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  1. Written Communication
  2. Written Communication
  3. Across the Disciplines
  4. Assessing Writing
  5. Pedagogy
  6. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
  7. Across the Disciplines
  8. Across the Disciplines
  9. Written Communication
  10. Written Communication
  11. Written Communication
  12. Written Communication
  13. Written Communication

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