Reading :: Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business: Thoughts on the Past, Present, Future, and Nurturing of Homo Scribens

By Charles Bazerman

The link above goes, not to Amazon, but to the WAC Clearinghouse, the open-access publisher that Charles Bazerman has used for his books for years. (I think his first book at WAC Clearinghouse was a collection he coedited with David R. Russell in 2003.) Because he publishes through WAC Clearinghouse, he can distribute his books more quickly and broadly, and readers can read them at no cost. 

I suspect that at the WAC Clearinghouse, he also has a freer hand than he would at a for-profit publisher, where an editor might take a more active role. Such editorial constraints may not appeal to Bazerman at this point: he is newly retired and his recently published works have focused on (a) pulling together the threads of his wide-ranging research and insights and (b) yielding a cohesive overview of their implications for future work. That’s true in his festschrift and his recent autobiography/autoethnography —- and it’s certainly true in Unfinished Business as well, which combines versions of previously published works with unpublished ones. In the Introduction, he explains:

Almost half of these chapters are previously unpublished, either freshly written for this volume (Chapters 1, 2, 6, 9, 19) or transformed from recent conference presentations (Chapters 7, 8, 10). Some have been published in places not usually seen as part of writing studies (Chapters 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18) or only in Spanish translation (Chapter 15). Some, though published and accessible, nonetheless fill in some of the connections among the other essays (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 11). Together, I hope they present how I see writing and its instruction these days. None are the last word, and I rely on some speculative leaps. Yet I hope they intrigue some researchers to pursue questions, seek evidence, or await more definitive knowledge from researchers in other disciplines.

The questions addressed here range from the most fundamental ideas about humans as writers and writing as constituting modern society to the most practical issues of curriculum and teaching. The answers to some may someday become clearer as data are gathered or as the future reveals what will happen. Other questions are less empirical and more about our values and commitments as writing instructors. But they all relate in some way to the purposes, means, skills, situations, and development of writers—and our actions as instructors. In ways more distant or immediate, they all bear on what we do on Mondays. (p.3)

These materials are arranged in five sections, totaling 263 pages:

1. Section I: How evolution produced writing humans and how writing humans remade their world.

2. Section II: Writing and knowledge

3. Section III: Nurturing Homo Scribens: Puzzles of writing instruction

4. Section IV: The ethics and values of writing

5. Section V: Guesses at unknown futures

And within those sections, Bazerman draws on a vast set of materials, many of which he has produced, but many from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, the rhetoric of science, sociology, and many others. 

If you’re thinking that it might be difficult to keep such a book cohesive — that was my experience as well. Each section represents a broad topic in itself, and even within one section, traveling from one chapter to the next entails encountering different disciplines and literatures. In addition, chapters range widely, with some being densely cited (Chapter 5 cites 34 sources), others thinly so (Chapter 6 cites only two sources). Even though I’m pretty familiar with Bazerman’s works and at least a good chunk of his sources, I sometimes had trouble finding the thread of a consistent argument. Sometimes the chapters felt like different conversations being had by different communities. Here, I think a more active editor could have helped to iron out some of the connections that I suspect are blindingly obvious to Bazerman, but not always clear to readers.

Nevertheless, the chapters in toto provide a grand unifying vision of writing as a uniquely human pursuit that has been explored across a range of disciplines and complexities. In highly literate societies, writing sometimes seems natural — but examined carefully, it is revealed as a complex set of human practices that are rooted in our biological abilities and proclivities, exercised through our material environments, culturally constituted in sometimes ragged layers, constantly practiced and constantly evolving, through subtle and overt conflicts as well as concessions and collaborations. These many chapters help us to explore these different aspects of writing, from its origins in the past to its current applications to its possible futures. If you’re interested in writing, definitely pick up this book.