Writing Thresholds: A Website about Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies
Writing and Knowledge Making
Key Threshold Idea: Writing helps us build knowledge and communicate that knowledge to others.
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Knowledge is communicated through writing, and it is also built as we write. The act of writing is, in part, an act of constructing knowledge because it can generate knowledge we didn’t have before (Estrem, 2015).
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How writing is structured influences the way that knowledge is received by the audience and communicated to others.
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Recognizing that writing also builds knowledge can draw attention to not only what is being said but also how it is being communicated outwards (Ogilvie, 2019 offers an idea of how this can work in first-year writing classrooms).
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Writing allows us to create ideas, not merely find them (Flower & Hayes, 1980). It is an epistemological tool (it’s a big part of knowledge-building processes)
Quotes from the Field
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“Understanding the knowledge-making potential of writing can help people engage more purposefully with writing for varying purposes” (Estrem, 2015, p. 20).
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Writing “is a technology for thinking, and so it may be the case that we interiorize the technology of writing itself to shape the possibilities for meaning” (Brooke & Grabill, 2015, p. 34).
Audio Example
References
Brooke, C., & Grabill, J.T.. (2015). Writing is a technology through which writers create and
recreate meaning. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 32-34). Utah State UP.
Estrem, H. (2015). Writing is a knowledge-making activity. In L. Adler-Kassner & E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 19-20). Utah State UP.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J. (1980). The cognition of discovery: defining a rhetorical problem.
College Composition and Communication, 31(1), 21-32.
Ogilvie, A. (2019). FYC students as writing studies scholars: Promoting Procedural knowledge
through participation. In B. Bird, D. Downs, I.M. McCracken, & J. Rieman (Eds.), Next steps: New directions for/in writing about writing (pp. 143-145). Utah State UP.