Reading :: How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became

How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became: An Experiment in Autoethnography

By Charles Bazerman

Charles Bazerman has been a pivotal figure in writing studies for decades: as an author of textbooks, as a methodologist, as a genre scholar, as a foremost thinker on how to understand writing as developing as a cultural practice. Most recently, he has investigated the lifelong development of writing. In this book, which is the first book in the Lifespan Writing Research book series, Bazerman examines his own lifelong trajectory as a writer, and calls for further work in this area. 

The book is a true autoethnography in the sense that Bazerman doesn’t offer a sanitized set of reflections. Rather, he goes back through his extensive personal archives of school-age writing assignments and scholarly drafts to examine how his writing techniques, themes, and concerns changed over time. That is, although reflective, the account is also based in archival evidence.

So how does this book fare? As a reader, I was divided. 

The fact that Bazerman is a central figure in our field (and one whom I personally admire) makes the book interesting to me. We get to see how he took his journey toward writing studies and the choices he made along the way, and he is unflinching in discussing his limitations and mistakes as a writer throughout his life. As he says on p.117, “Writing, of course, is fraught with anxiety, and also open to digression, distraction, or even avoidance,” and Bazerman talks openly about these anxieties and how he has dealt with them throughout his life. This sentiment is apparently common among writers (as I discovered some years ago in a workgroup session Chuck led, in which participating writing researchers arrayed around a table told their literacy narratives, which all seemed centered around anxiety). Nevertheless, Bazerman discusses how these anxieties propelled his development as he shifted from an early interest in physics to literary studies to more pragmatic writing instruction as an inner-city high school teacher. At the same time, a strong allegiance to social justice shaped his path, as did a consistent curiosity and drive to improve himself. 

Bazerman was, of course, raised in the 1960s, and some of the things he describes doing just don’t compute for my Gen X mind. Time and again he describes taking on a job (in the Peace Corps, as a camp counselor, as part of a team developing pedagogical materials) only to decide a couple of weeks later that it wasn’t for him, quitting the job and moving to another pursuit. (In a parallel theme, he also repeatedly “became persona non grata for advocating unpopular programs” (p.221)). He also describes what I can only characterize as “Forrest Gump” moments in which he has brushes with significant history: rooming with a student who would eventually become an architect of the Gulf War, writing early scripts for a TV program that eventually aired as Sesame Street (the scripts were not filmed), and taking a road trip to San Francisco “just in time to see the moon landing televised on the ceiling of the Fillmore West during a Joe Cocker and Country Joe and the Fish concert” (p.116). Counterbalancing this freedom was the ever-present threat of the draft, which pushed Bazerman to continue his college studies and then his graduate studies. 

As we get to Ch.18, Bazerman begins discussing his scholarly work, including his fateful meeting with Carolyn Miller that got him thinking about genre (p.143). This concept dovetailed with his earlier reading on social perspectives and prepared him for later becoming aware of Yrjo Engestrom’s work at a 1992 conference (p.144, footnote 7). In Ch.19, he discusses becoming interested in the sociology of science, and how (in another Forrest Gump moment) a faculty colleague “suggested that I contact Robert Merton, the founder of the field, who was just a subway ride uptown at Columbia University” (p.151). Through that encounter, Bazerman began sitting in on Merton’s graduate seminars, honing his critique and approach to science studies, and laying the foundation for his book Shaping Written Knowledge. Meanwhile, he also participated in an NEH summer seminar at Carnegie-Mellon led by Richard Young, where he was introduced to the classical rhetorical tradition (which he found useful but limited, p.160). He reached an inflection point, one that the field of writing studies itself was approaching: “I recognized that writing studies would benefit from a sociologically oriented research program to supplement the on-going cognitive psychological research program of process studies. I also started to gain the sociological and historical tools to understand how I could support the substantive research along with institutional presence and legitimacy of writing studies” (p.162). 

This inflection point, of course, drew him to the works of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Voloshinov, and their more recent synthesis in Engestrom. “Over the next few years, I drew on David Russell’s formulations of activity systems (Russell, 1994), and I collaborated with him on a couple of collections that encouraged work in a similar vein (Russell & Bazerman, 1997i; Bazerman & Russell, 2003g)” (pp.199-200; see also pp.212-213; n.b., David R. Russell was my dissertation director).  

As readers will intuit, I found this later part of the book far more interesting than the earlier parts. Although Bazerman’s focus is on how writing changes over the lifespan, I realized that my focus was more on understanding the background of his scholarly works and, through them, that background’s impact on our field. And I think this is the underlying tension in the book: Without the unique positioning of the author as a foremost scholar of writing studies, the early part of the book is hard to find interesting. That is, it probably can’t serve as a model for more general lifespan writing research — if it were a lesser light, would we be interested in their reflections on their grade-school essays? 

In any case, if you are interested in lifespan writing research, in the development of writing studies, or in the background of Bazerman’s impressive scholarship, I highly recommend this book.