A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to The Modern United States

A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to The Modern United States

This newly revised Thirtieth Anniversary edition provides a robust scholarly introduction to the history of writing instruction in the West from Ancient Greece to the present-day United States. It preserves the legacy of writing instruction from antiquity to contemporary times with a unique focus on the material, educational, and institutional context of the Western rhetorical tradition. Its longitudinal approach enables students to track the recurrence over time of not only specific teaching methods, but also major issues such as social purpose, writing as power, the effect of technologies, orthography, the rise of vernaculars, writing as a force for democratization, and the roles of women in rhetoric and writing instruction. Each chapter provides pedagogical tools including a Glossary of Key Terms and a Bibliography for Further Study. In this edition, expanded coverage of twenty-first-century issues includes Writing Across the Curriculum pedagogy, pedagogy for multilingual writers, and social media. A Short History of Writing Instruction is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in writing studies, rhetoric and composition, and the history of education. Praise for the 3rd edition "What a remarkable book, covering such a wide sweep of history. I've relied on it for decades, and now we have this fine revision. It is an essential resource." -- Mike Rose, UCLA Graduate School of Education "I hope teachers of writing through all educational levels will be drawn to this volume by its title and will come away with a sense of the richness and complexity of speaking, reading, and writing pedagogies in historically specific contexts. This collection makes a strong case for the value of investigating those histories for help with pressing questions about the role of the English teacher, the composition curriculum, and the rhetoric curriculum in our own historical movement." -- Susan C. Jarratt, University of California, Irvine " A Short History of Writing Instruction is a thoroughly researched but broadly accessible collection of period pieces by noted historians. The collection should be of particular interest to those who are interested in institutional and sociocultural histories and recent efforts to deepen our engagement with the craft." -- Thomas P. Miller, University of Arizona James J. Murphy is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English and the Department of Communication at the University of California, Davis. Christopher Thaiss is Professor Emeritus of Writing Studies in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis.