The Case for Writing Studies as a Major Discipline
Charles Bazerman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Literate activity, directly and indirectly, occupies much of the day of people in modern society. Literacy in its basic and more elaborated, specialized forms is the cornerstone in the education of the young. Literacy and symbolic artifacts underlay the information age and its information economy. Literacy along with its enabling technologies and consequent forms of social, political, and economic organization, has supported ways of life that distinguish us from humans of 5000 years ago. Literate engagement is also associated with forms of belief, commitment, and consciousness that shape modern personality. Yet the study of writing--its production, its circulation, its uses, its role in the development of individuals and societies, and its learning by individuals, social collectives, and historically emergent cultures--remains a dispersed enterprise. Inquiry into skills, practices, objects, and consequences of reading and writing is the concern of only a few people, fragmented across university disciplines, with no serious home of its own. How is it that all this enormity is the interest of a few linguistic anthropologists, a very few psychologists, an occasional sociologist, scattered cultural historians and scholars, some applied linguists, some education researchers, and an increasing but still limited number of people in the teaching of writing in higher education? It is as though universities had no departments of psychology--in denial that cognition and affect were significant and worth organized energetic inquiry--or no departments of sociology--denying that society had any significant and regular impact on our lives worth studying--or economics, or mathematics, or physics or biology. These disciplines address fundamental issues in the