From focused writing to writing by-the-way Investigating the digital literacy shift in professional writing
Submitted by:
Daniel Perrin
Abstract:
In cultural literacies investigated so far, the functions of writing as a distinctive mode of language use have developed and expanded from mnemotechnical to communicative and epistemic writing. Throughout this development, writing has become an increasingly focused activity: people decide to engage in writing with the intention of producing a text that helps them memorize, share, or elaborate their thoughts. With emerging digital media, however, this focused way of writing has been more and more interfered with by a new, fragmentary, and incidental mode of language use we term “writing-by-the-way” (Hicks & Perrin, 2014). In my presentation, I analyze the role of language awareness in this digital literacy shift by juxtaposing perspectives from the German language tradition of Schreibforschung and that of Anglo-American writing research. The comparison shows how and why our field can benefit from mutual learning across research cultures.