Description:
What Writing Does and How It Does It offers a sophisticated introduction to methods for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices. It presents a variety of approaches to analyzing texts, and considers the processes of writing, exploring textual practices and their contexts, examining what texts do and how texts mean rather than what they mean.
Review Quotes:
"What Writing Does and How It Does It provides a satisfactory beginning for advanced students of writing and researchers in any field that uses texts. The book and its individual chapters is a good example of the kind of "bootstrapping operation" that any teacher or researcher might employ in order to assist their students or themselves to move beyond a "naturalized" outlook and revise their understanding of their own work as well as others".
--KAIROS A Journal of Rhetoric, Pedagogy and Technology
"...the book is unique in its grounding in North American Writing Studies and in that the chapters offer doable and practical research procedures for the teacher/researcher. The book will be a valuable resource for graduate students and teachers of writing interested in learning about how to use discourse analysis as a research and teaching tool."
--Rhetoric Review