On the front page of my course materials for my advanced writing in the disciplines class is this statement:
As Christians we know that the act of taking abstract thoughts and turning them into concrete language originated in the three-person God who used words to literally speak creation into existence. It follows that our ability to use words and language well is one of the ways that we bear his image. He creates; we create. He brings order to chaos; we bring clarity to the abstract. He communicates to us through His Word; we communicate with one another using the gift of language. What a great privilege and responsibility this is, especially for those of us who proclaim the gospel as our life’s work.
This conviction about the weightiness of writing is not unique at Christian universities. It is an acknowledgement that our ability to create and use words is a gift from God, and we have a responsibility to steward this gift well. The notion is fairly undisputed in faith-based university settings—that our words, our language, our writings have the potential to do great good or great harm depending on how we use the gifts God gives us. What may be more disputed is how our written ideas come into existence: whether we think of academic writing as an isolated individual act or as an interactive process embedded deeply in our communities. As believers, do we write primarily to express ourselves, or do we write as an outflow of shared identity where we make meaning in cooperation with others? In an era where machine writing is prevalent, the humanities are sometimes undervalued, and higher education itself is contested in some circles, this question matters, especially to the believer.
Of course, these two options are not mutually exclusive. We can be both self-expressive and community-oriented in our writing, and we can do both to the glory of God. However, the more time I spend in the academy, the more I am convinced that one common misconception about composition is that writing is primarily self-expressive, often to the exclusion of a deep connection to community.
This narrow view of writing has consequences for the believer who is committed to a Christ-like ethic of self-surrender. Philippians 2 describes Christ as one who “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself. . . .”[1] Paul is very clear here that God’s plan for redemption is enacted through Jesus’s identification with the people he plans to redeem. His first step toward saving us is becoming one of us. The incarnation and eventual death of Jesus is the ultimate act of humility and sacrifice both for and in the community. Earlier in the same chapter, Paul tells the Philippians that “each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4). Paul makes it clear that our work as Christians is grounded in our identities with Christ and with other believers. And this work redounds to all areas of the Christian life, including our scholarship. As an expression of identification with Christ, our writing should reflect humility and shared purpose. Therefore, we may do well to (re)frame our theology of writing as less about self-expression and more about making meaning with others for the common good.
As scholars in any discipline, we refine our writing to make our ideas clear, credible, and persuasive. This is indeed an important part of the writing process. But it’s easy to forget how our writing choices are shaped by the disciplinary community in which we operate. As Christians, if we fail to see how our communities influence us, if we envision writing as a self-expressive one-way street, we have missed an essential component of Christlike living. Rather, if we think of writing as deeply communal and formed mainly in collaboration with others, we have embraced a more profoundly Christian scholarly ethos. To think of writing as mere self-expression may potentially reduce it to self-centeredness, and this is a trap into which many students may easily fall. Rather, writing in its fullest manifestation is an act of love and humility; it is shared: identifying with and participating in a community.
In this paper, I propose that higher education has often privileged a definition of writing as individual expression over writing as an act of identifying with and participating in communities. The disproportionate emphasis on writing as an individualized practice may be problematic because it implicitly undermines deep connections we have to our communities of discourse. To make this case, first, I lay out the scholarship that demonstrates the communal nature of writing. Second, I outline how the culture of the academy may have (however inadvertently) perpetuated a problematic notion that writing is primarily individual expression. Third, I advocate for a theology of writing that is deeply rooted in community. Finally, I draw on classroom experience to propose a pedagogy that recaptures writing as belonging—decentering the self and situating it in communities of discourse and practice.
The Scholarship of Writing as Belonging
Research has long demonstrated that writing is a communal act. In a collaborative effort to articulate “threshold concepts” about writing, rhetoric, and composition, scholars Alder-Kassner and Wardle edited a collection of works that forefront the communal nature of writing.[2] The contributing researchers consistently point out that writing is social and that writers are “always connected to other people.”[3] The act of writing has also been described as “thinking with others,”[4] as well as “both relational and responsive.”[5] Understanding writing as communal begins with audience awareness. Effective writers can picture their intended audiences, know the needs of the readers, and anticipate potential objections. But an appreciation for writing as communal interaction and belonging goes beyond audience awareness. It extends to an understanding of context, genre, and the learning process itself.
Composition scholar Lloyd Bitzer’s seminal work The Rhetorical Situation decenters the author by directing focus to situations of texts.[6] Proper awareness of the rhetorical situation removes any pretense of writing as solely individuated and describes it as collectivist and responsive. Bitzer explains that “rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation, in the same way that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem.”[7] Bitzer intentionally uses the passive voice here to explain discourse “com[ing] into existence.” The focus is not on the author’s individual expression but rather on an awareness of the fuller context that demands human attention and utterance. Bitzer goes on to provide an example of air pollution as one such problem that calls for utterance. Here, the discourse is born out of shared human need. He notes, “reduction of pollution . . . strongly invites the assistance of discourse producing public awareness, indignation, and action of the right kind.”[8] Bitzer’s work suggests that rhetorical writing is less about individualized inspiration and more about circumstantial awareness within communities.
Where Bitzer highlights writing as a response to collective human need, Carolyn Miller extends this idea by acknowledging that these collective situations give rise to genres. One crucial way writers invite others join them in making meaning is by following conventions. When conventions are adopted and normalized in communities, they manifest as varying genres. However, composition scholars have debated over what genre is, how it comes to be, and whether genres are “stable.” Miller contends that genre is something that is “enacted.”[9] That is, conventions and patterns recognizable in genres are the result of the culturized habits of human communities. Composition scholars argue that these genre patterns are only temporarily or relatively stable as sociocultural dynamics shift.[10] Composition scholar David Russell adds to Miller’s ideas by noting that genres are “typical because people typify them” and use them to mediate human activities.[11] Research for the last four decades on genre affirms that the act of writing is interconnected with social and cultural dynamics in the community.
Furthermore, Russell builds on the concept of community by comparing the process of learning the conventions of genres to the process of learning a language for the first time. The student who is new to disciplinary writing is similar to language learning because, as beginners, they experiment, often clunkily, with the nuances of language as they start to enter the community.[12] In these early stages, where the student is learning how to become a member of their academic community, their writing does not usually meet the standards of fully active members. At this point, Russell argues that participation in the community as a scholar is key to learning to write in its various forms and conventions. In his book about the curricular history of disciplinary writing, Russell notes that learning a language runs parallel to learning to become a member of the discourse community. He claims:
Eventually, the neophyte so thoroughly internalizes the discourse of the community, and with it, she begins to think and act—and write—like a member of the community. By the time she is accepted as adept, she has at least tacitly understood the community’s values and goals, its rules and sanctions; she has developed an allegiance to the community, an identity and role within it.[13]
Russell’s point furthers the argument for belonging. Just as a toddler experiments with and eventually adopts the language of his family, a budding scholar’s success in disciplinary writing depends heavily on her immersion in the texts and discourse. Learning to write effectively, like language acquisition, is necessarily embedded in the life of the community.
The Culture of the Academy
Research on the rhetorical situation and immersion in genres suggests that writing well begins with reading well. Cultivating close reading and astute listening to understand genre are crucial parts of the curriculum. Genre conventions are not arbitrary. Where they exist to mediate an activity, educators are responsible to help students understand their purposes. Allow me to reflect on my own writerly experience as a case-in-point. After having spent so much of my career in the humanities, I was surprised when I entered my PhD program and learned that one of the conventions of APA style (the format in which my dissertation was written) limited the use of metaphoric language. In my specific program, metaphoric language was not allowed. This particular convention, as it was enacted in my community, felt like a personal assault on my unique and creative way of expressing ideas. Of course, I quickly learned that in the behavioral sciences, clarity and precision are valued over abstractions and creativity. Any language that might leave ideas open to interpretation could mislead its readers. This is a communal value, and if I were to be part of the community, I needed to enact these values in my writing. Seeing the convention as arbitrary misses its function: it is there to serve the needs of the discourse community. Writers, whether they are scholars, students, or professionals, must be literate in the genres they enact, because by expressing their ideas in that genre, they are identifying with, honoring, and serving a particular community. These genre expressions are not solely or even primarily individualistic. Rather, genre expressions represent authors inhabiting the identity of their discourse community and making meaning with those they serve.
One obstacle that may stand in the way of students’ writing from a position of belonging is the existence of tacit expectations. In their book Writing Expertise, Adler-Kassner and Wardle demonstrate how professors have assimilated into the practices and communication styles of their discipline. Their successes in writing practices have, over time, become second nature. The authors note that experts have an internalized awareness of things like insider language and ways of making knowledge, and “as these characteristics become more familiar, they become what people believe to be ‘commonsense.’ ”[14] However, there is often a gap between what instructors view as “commonsense” writing habits, and what students know or have experienced. Community standards for writing often represent implicit values, and these values vary between disciplines.
At the same time, universities often inadvertently undermine their own communal expectations. While we hold students accountable to write like us in our way and with our conventions, we often simultaneously promote a kind of private intellectual individuality. Some composition scholars have made the case that the humanities in themselves, even where they attempt to restore classical themes, have become a professionalized program that fosters an enhanced understanding of the self. Russell criticizes the modern liberal arts tradition (what he calls “liberal culture”) as sometimes nurturing students to become “belletristic” resisters of “babbitry” with prized vocations as “arbiters, preservers, and defenders of the great tradition, introducing high culture to . . . the middle class.”[15] Russell makes a case that the original, classical intent of rhetorical training was for students to be able to participate in their communities, bringing an understanding of language and rhetoric to bear on their work in the public square. But an argument can be made that some modern iterations of classical humanities are more focused on appreciation of the aesthetic value of texts as well as critical interpretation of them. Russell describes this form of education as a “cultivation of private taste and individual acumen”[16] that has veered from its original purposes to serve the common good.
And Russell is not alone; his concerns are echoed in the voices of other scholars. In his fictional work (and elsewhere), C. S. Lewis put forth themes about whether the process of criticism and analysis of text undermines the search for truth.[17] In both Russell’s and Lewis’s viewpoints, the value of discourse is in how it bears out practically in life. Their ideas suggest that it matters how we understand the function of text in our institutions and in our broader communities. Their views suggest that an understanding of text as primarily personal affects the way we approach student writing in the academy. Ultimately, encouraging an individualized pursuit of aesthetics or self-improvement could be at odds with our determination to hold students accountable to communal standards of writing. That is, where individuated expression is centered, our Christian ideals of humility and shared purpose may be undermined, as are our disciplinary values. The result is that students see things like citations, formatting, and other conventions as arbitrary rather than tethered to disciplinary values and expressed in Christian love.
Of course, the communal nature of writing does not mean self-expression is absent. My argument is that to define the aim of writing as mere self-expression is not a complete understanding of what it is. To conceive of writing as primarily individualistic is to short sell its purpose in important ways. There are reasons to believe our students are confused on this issue. As we know, Western cultural values tend to elevate individualism over collectivism. We need not look far to see individualistic, self-expressive writing taking the forms of rants, tirades, and manifestos in social media. But it does us no good to point our fingers outside of our universities if we are not reflective about what is happening inside them.
Along with the tendency for university systems to cultivate “private taste and individual acumen,”[18] we often fail to realize that many of our students will not perform our versions of academic writing after they leave the academy. They will certainly write and communicate regularly using language, but for many students, the “academic” writing they do in school does not translate well into real-world settings. As academics, we tend to console ourselves on this matter by thinking that research and writing practices are a good in-and-of themselves and that these habits will translate into practical applications naturally. But the scholarship on teaching for transfer demonstrates that this is not always the case. When students face new writing tasks, their learned skills do not always rise to the surface naturally. Writing practices that have been previously acquired often need to be deliberately and explicitly drawn out and re-examined to fit new forms.[19] Students often need concrete connections between what they are learning and how they will be living. This is the reason High Impact Practice (HIP) produces quality learning.[20] Through personalized relationships, community service learning, and real-life research, HIP explicitly draws connections between scholarship and life outside the classroom. As it turns out, writing in an academic void may perpetuate misconceptions about writing as an individual endeavor.
Unfortunately, our academic systems are often set up without a cohesive plan for student writing. In some areas where writing is assigned, the lone teacher is the only audience for a student’s writing. In other cases, teaching assistants scan student writing for key content points. Some focus primarily on syntax and error, not acknowledging the essential ideas of the students’ text. Sometimes, the paper is not read at all. Furthermore, students may or may not understand that the instructor represents the broader community in the discipline rather than a niche audience with pet preferences. Where institutions have not made comprehensive plans about what writing is and how it functions, it may be very possible that they reinforce students’ conceptions of writing as performed in a vacuous echo chamber. If students do not participate in a feedback loop with writing instructors, they fail to make meaning with others, and they have no reason to believe writing is anything but isolated at best and self-indulgent at worst.
Of course, these theories about writing, genre, and even literary studies vary greatly as they play out in our respective institutions. But the extent to which we value individual thought and ideas while at the same time holding students accountable to key communal standards should, at the very least, give us pause. As instructors, we may be unaware of the contradiction: that we require students to tacitly accept communal values of our fields while simultaneously encouraging an individualistic understanding of writing.
A Theology of Belonging: Writers are Rooted
There exists a radical kind of belonging that has always been a fundamental value of biblical Christianity. Notions of belonging to the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12) and building one another up (1 Thessalonians 5) are built into the ethos of our faith. We claim that we are in Christ (Romans 8:1, Colossians 3:3) and that he is in us. Furthermore, our theology of substitutionary atonement takes the idea of identity with Christ to another level. 2 Corinthians reads “for our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus becoming sin so that we might become righteousness reveals belonging that transcends mere sentiment about unity.
But do these radical ideas about identity and belonging extend even to authorship of our sacred text? How might shared belonging be a feature of biblical authorship? Students of the Word have puzzled over the ways in which biblical text is written by humans but inspired by God. Some ask whether the words of the triune God, often spoken by Jesus, should be more elevated than other words in scripture written by mere mortals. But Peter writes, “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1 Peter 1:21). In the Bible, our greatest form of written text, we see God choosing to work with and through humans—humans who are deeply connected and belonging to him—to express his most important message.
Furthermore, the complex and communal nature of the author also extends to the audience. One common notion in biblical studies is that the Bible is written for us but not to us.[21] Proper understanding of scripture requires both careful study of its details as well as general knowledge of the big picture. The meanings of some passages are self-evident, while others are best understood in tandem with relevant scriptural counterparts. If there was ever a case for grasping the rhetorical situation of a text, this is it. The written Word, God’s mode of divine revelation, is an invitation for its readers to make meaning with Him. But let us not misunderstand the act of making meaning here. This is not a call to relativistic or hyper-personalized interpretation. It is, instead, a call to active engagement between author and audience. It is a call to a relationship and a community, to sonship and inheritance, to life abundantly, to eternal presence with the Father.
In Ephesians 3, Paul describes the effects of being loved by Christ. He writes
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know that this love surpasses all knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all fullness of God.[22]
Paul’s words not only depict the vastness of God’s love for his children, but they also demonstrate his longing that believers would understand or grasp their deep rootedness in it. The love of God gives us a calling that is rooted in a particular identity.
Yet, some cultural ideas may tell a different story about belonging. Carl Trueman, in his work The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, documents a culture of what has come to be known as “expressive individualism.”[23] Unlike those rooted in the identity of Christ, Trueman makes a case for prominent cultural norms that disconnect people from their places of belonging. He outlines our cultural moment as one where our individualized feelings about ourselves have become the primary indicators of our identities, and that in order to be authentically ourselves, we need to inhabit some “outward expression of our inward feelings.”[24] According to Trueman, this cultural notion of identity arising from deeply personal feelings exists in contrast to historical understandings of the self as defined by external authority. Trueman asserts that in our current culture, our inner feelings may have more authority over our identities than any external, scientific, naturally ordered, or religious law.
Trueman’s claims may have implications for student writers. As believers, “rooted and established in love,”[25] we understand that scripture (not to mention the natural, created order) has authority over how we live and who we are. In theory, many students at Christian universities will not disagree with this important Christian ideal. But when it comes to living in the realities of Western cultural experiences, it can be tempting for students to make major decisions based on (fleeting) emotions. In fact, they may be doing it without even knowing it. This tendency to look solely to the self for meaning is why it is crucial for students to understand that they are ultimately rooted in both biblical truth and their communities of scholarship. Like the precepts outlined in scripture, communities of practice provide standards, guidelines, conventions, and boundaries for us to follow. Just as we point students to scripture to help them know who they are, we need to point them to the assumptions, worldviews, and values behind the genres they enact. In doing this, we make their rootedness visible to them.
To be sure, the idea of being deeply bound to a community may seem both healthy and potentially problematic. However, a rooted, Christlike posture of belonging is not the same as assimilation, where unique personhood is lost or overlooked. Where assimilation suggests absorption into the group, belonging suggests mutual acceptance of one another. Our disciplinary communities, as we well know, sometimes hold values that are incompatible with our faith. But belonging to these communities situates students to reflect on them as insiders, even where they might disagree with their members. I would argue that viewing writing as primarily self-expressive without this kind of rootedness is potentially more problematic than the possible risks of belonging to various communities.
Our sense of rootedness in biblical authority is a good that runs parallel to belonging to our discourse communities. We were created to be rooted. We see a robust understanding of rootedness manifesting in the university itself. The liberal arts project (which many would argue is an outflow of Christianity’s historical influence on culture) is specifically designed to balance a perspective of scientism and naturalism with subjects that embrace enchantment and imagination such as literature and art. Some subjects approach their epistemology in ways that appear to run counter to other subjects. And it is good for us to investigate these differences. Students in biology classes adopt the scientific method in their practice because this is how biologists understand the world. However, crossing the hall to study in the arts, humanities, and theology helps budding biologists realize that physical observation is not the only way of knowing truth. Different disciplines are rooted in their own unique ways of knowing.
If we are not explicit about these epistemologies, if we take them for granted because we are daily saturated in them, we run the risk of making them invisible to our students. They may never understand why their field’s epistemological approach informs their practice. In failing to interact critically with their communities, students may, at best, appropriate their community standards rather thoughtlessly, or, at worst, write free-floating personal expressions that are untethered to any communal ideals.
A theology of rootedness helps shape student identity. When students see they are rooted, they have reason to explore and investigate implicit values to understand why they are enacted. In the writing course, this awareness prompts curiosity about language, which students are free to explore in their disciplines. And in its best forms, it helps students situate themselves within the context of their discipline’s values, with eyes to see both positive and negative ideals embedded within them. The project of writing is not a simple skill to be acquired like a trade. It requires writers to employ an interconnected network of language, genre awareness, epistemological commitments, and multi-layered thinking. And it works best when students have a sense of belonging.
Writing as Belonging in the Classroom
First-year Writing: Thinking with Others
I teach a first-year composition class called “Critical Thinking and Writing,” the title of which captures two of the three main outcomes addressed in the course: critical thinking, writing, and information literacy. Early in the semester, we explore the questions of what it means to be a critical thinker, and I start by having my students consider the role their community plays in their thinking. Initially, most students defend their inner thoughts as exclusively their own, often arguing that the best way of thinking is “thinking for yourself.” So, we dig into the details. First, I have them recall the last time they made a big decision such as buying a car or deciding on which university to attend. They write out the steps they took to make that decision and how they came to decide it was “good.” Invariably, as they share, students point to their conversations with respected others as part of their process. If they wanted to buy a car, they talked to their families about the qualities of the car; in considering a college, they went to the campus and talked with other students. Then, I have them read Alan Jacobs, who challenges the way our culture praises people for “thinking for themselves,” calling it a misplaced ideal. Jacobs claims that “thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you do is a response to what someone else has thought and said.”[26] Initially, many students respond to this claim with skepticism and outright resistance, arguing that there are absolutely times when they make decisions completely on their own. But little by little, as they consider their personal experiences, they note how closely their lives are intertwined with others’ lives. If they’ve chosen a church because their friend recommended it and the preaching seemed biblical, there are at least three other humans involved in that decision: the friend, the preacher, and the biblical author. Gradually, students come to understand how deeply their reasoning depends on communities. They come to realize that their thinking is already embedded in networks of belonging. Bringing this reality to the surface of their awareness matters as they begin to write.
As we wrestle with the idea that critical thinking is done in communities of belonging, we begin to see research in the same light. Writing studies instructors often frame the process of doing research as entering a conversation that already exists.[27] This framing is designed to help students understand that they are not alone in their concern for the issue they have chosen, but that other thinkers have studied it before them. Their job is to seek out these thinkers, understand what they have to say, and join in the “conversation.” This longstanding approach to research as a conversation is reinforced by the notion that thinking is necessarily communal. It also humanizes the scholarship. At a time when students may well be confused about whether machines can produce ideas, connections drawn between real people and their research is a crucial part of the learning. Identifying the researchers as other thinkers in the community, students ask themselves, how might I think with these people? Over time, students come to see that our ability to add value to a subject is dependent on our careful reading and understanding of scholars and thinkers who are already experts in the field. In the research assignment, especially for novice students, our ability to write something meaningful may be less about our own unique expressions and more about understanding and joining the meaning-making process that already exists. The goal in first-year writing becomes helping students see that, as budding scholars, they are in good company.
Advanced Writing in the Disciplines:
A Two-directional Model of Becoming and Belonging
My third-year writing course, “Writing in the Disciplines,” is made up of students from various majors. I begin the first few classes explicitly using the language “belonging and becoming” as descriptive of students’ emergence into their field of practice. This language recasts the students’ academic experience from studying in a particular field to becoming a particular expert or professional. A student who says they are studying political science is different from a student who identifies as becoming a political scientist. The former indicates something of a detached gaze; the latter demands reflection and responsibility.
We use this language as a two-directional model, in part, to foster a new level of accountability for students who are entering their fields. As students learn to become disciplinary writers, they must think about their communities from two perspectives. First, there is an outward-facing component. Students learn that those who take time to receive our written messages deserve to be respected. When the structures and conventions of our writing are clear to audiences, we are not only representing our field well, but our messages are more likely to be received. Learning to think about what audiences need, and unfolding the work in a way that makes sense for them is an advanced skill. It requires an understanding of genre as a thing that makes meaning accessible to others. And it also requires a deep sense of responsibility to a community of readers. It is the process of making meaning. Becoming a member of a disciplinary community decenters the student as a lone voice and resituates her as one of the many scholars in her field. When the student has rightly perceived her audience as a community to which she belongs, she recognizes that the meaning-making process is shared.
Second, sound writing practices have an inward-facing component that might be best described as rooted. Students who are beginning to write in their disciplines need to explicitly explore genres in their fields and question what these genres represent. For the first assignment in this class, we explore how varied genres represent sub-cultural values specific to disciplines. Students are still learning what makes writing effective in their fields, and there is often only an implicit understanding of why writing functions differently in varied disciplines. When students are required to closely read and analyze features of their scholarly genres before they write in them, they start to gain an understanding of how these genres mediate particular activities. For instance, they may discover anew why a biologist who embraces the scientific method writes in hyper-structured formulas. The reality that this formulaic writing mediates the activity of replication and building toward future discovery becomes newly apparent in the study of conventions. Where before, students held genre conventions in the abstract, never quite connecting them to the activities mediated, they now understand that these conventions come with a set of values. And they are then poised to participate. Writing within their disciplinary genre conventions requires communal awareness that situates students in line with other humans.
Perhaps, in the age of generative AI, this idea of writing as an expression of belonging is more important than ever. If we value critical thinking in general, we need to guard the ways in which our thinking is shaped, and who or what is shaping it. In my endeavor to help my third-year writing students to see that conventions are not arbitrary, we explore the ways in which we reference and cite our scholarship. One issue of note is that research is generally referenced not by the titles of the artifacts, but by the names of the authors. In the bibliographic information, the name of the author always comes first. This matters because ideas do not exist apart from their creators. Ideas come exclusively from people, not machines. In mentioning an author’s name in our research, we honor them, and we acknowledge that there are gifted humans behind the ideas with which we have interacted even when we disagree with them. Conversely, if we resort to machines for writing, we are not making meaning in our communities of humans; rather, we are attempting to transmit knowledge without a community of meaning-makers. The disembodied nature of AI stands in contrast to the deeply rooted, relational character of writing. This distinction between human and machine writing matters if we care about where and to whom we belong.
Final Thoughts
In the book Everything Sad is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri masterfully recounts stories of his childhood as an Iranian refugee from the perspective of a young person. Toward the end of the book, he describes his mother actively reading the Bible while also praying. He writes, “reading is the act of speaking and listening at the same time, with someone you’ve never met, but love. Even if you hate them. It’s a loving thing to do.”[28] The main speaker in Nayeri’s story is on to something here. If reading is an act of listening and speaking, it would follow that writing is an act of speaking and listening. In fact, one might argue that the reciprocal relationship between speaking and listening is a theme from Nayeri’s book that highlights a sense of godliness.
1 Corinthians 13 begins with the words “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” It is a stern warning for those who might be “self-seeking” or “easily angered,” or who would attempt to communicate without patience and kindness. Likewise, the act of writing centers loving connections. When it is performed at its best, it is careful, slow, and attentive.
My hope is that in developing their craft, students would learn to situate themselves as one member of a wider community of meaning-makers. But this process of decentering the self takes time. It requires an awareness of belonging. And, as Philippians 2 shows us, the act of identifying with others in shared belonging is sacred. It has the potential to move us toward Christlikeness. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 3, might say the steady work of transformation helps us “remove the veil” and “behold the glory of the Lord.” Writing is a process of belonging and becoming that mirrors this passage. In the Christian life, where we recast learning as a posture of humility and belonging, we have the potential to be “transformed” into the image of Christ “from one degree of glory to another.” Amen. So let it be.
[1]. Philippians 2:7–8. All scripture quotations from NIV unless otherwise noted.
[2]. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, eds., Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (University Press of Colorado, 2015).
[3]. Kevin Roozen, “Writing is a social and rhetorical activity,” in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, eds. Linda Alder-Kasner and Elizabeth Wardle (University Press of Colorado, 2015), 17.
[4]. Heidi Estrem, “Writing is a Knowledge-making Activity,” in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, eds. Linda Alder-Kasner and Elizabeth Wardle (University Press of Colorado, 2015), 19.
[5]. Andrea Lunsford, “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences,” in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, eds. Linda Alder-Kasner and Elizabeth Wardle (University Press of Colorado, 2015), 20.
[6]. Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 1–14.
[7]. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” 5.
[8]. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” 7.
[9]. Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984): 151–167.
[10]. Bill Hart-Davidson, “Genres are Enacted by Writers and Readers,” in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, eds. Linda Alder-Kasner and Elizabeth Wardle (University Press of Colorado, 2015), 39–40.
[11]. David R. Russell, “Genre as Social Action: A Gaze into Phenomenology,” Composition Forum 31 (January 1, 2015).
[12]. David R. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History (SIU Press, 2002).
[13]. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 16.
[14]. Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Ann Wardle, Writing Expertise: A Research-based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines (WAC Clearinghouse, 2022), 9.
[15]. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 168–169.
[16]. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 173.
[17]. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Harper Collins, 1982).
[18]. Adler-Kassner and Wardle, Writing Expertise.
[19]. The learned process of analyzing prior knowledge about writing in order to determine how it fits new contexts is a metacognitive process scholars have called “boundary crossing.” See Kathleen Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak, Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing (University Press of Colorado, 2014); Jessie L. Moore, “Five Essential Principles About Writing Transfer,” in Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning in Higher Education, eds. Randall Bass, and Jessie Moore (Taylor and Francis, 2017), 1–12.
[20]. The pedagogy of High Impact Practice (HIPs) was originally researched and presented by George Kuh. See George Kuh and Ken O’Donnell, “Ensuring Quality and Taking High-impact Practices to Scale,” Peer Review 15, no. 2 (2013): 32–33.
[21]. This approach to interpreting scripture has been championed by Old Testament Scholar John H. Walton. See Adam E. Miglio, Caryn A. Reeder, Joshua T. Walton, and Kenneth C. Way, eds. For Us, But Not to Us: Essays on Creation, Covenant, and Context in Honor of John H. Walton (Wipf and Stock, 2020).
[22]. Ephesians 3:17–19.
[23]. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020).
[24]. From Scott Rae and Scott McDowell’s podcast, Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture, podcast, “Reclaiming the Historic Christian Faith (with Carl Trueman),” Biola University, June 25, 2024, https://www.biola.edu/blogs/think-biblically.
[25]. Ephesians 3:17.
[26]. Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (Currency, 2017), 37.
[27]. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (University of California Press, 1941), 110–11; and more recently, Heather M. Hoover, Composition as Conversation: Seven Virtues for Effective Writing (Baker Academic, 2023).
[28]. Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad is Untrue (Chronicle Books, 2020), 333.
