About Writing Studies

The following passages were really useful in helping me think about my own field. Taken from Doug Downs book chapter, "Teaching First-Year Writers to Use Texts."

Writing Studies is marked by a free mix of research methodologies from the humanities and social sciences—or in Michael Carter's terms, the meta-genres of research-from-sources and empirical inquiry (396-98)...Despite its positioning in English departments, Writing Studies also often behaves like a social science. While showing discomfort with positivist empirical epistemology (or a humanist's fear of parametric statistics), the field was born in and continues to value data-driven rather than only or purely theoretical analysis... Resulting from this blended epistemology, a given article may work across multiple fields and take methods as it finds them, even though such practice can lead to methodological "looseness" that the fields originating the methods might take issue with. Writing Studies texts also tend to valorize personal experience and believe that more can accurately be said about the experiences of a small number of writers discussed in detail (as through ethnography, case study, longitudinal study, and interview) than about larger datasets generated through experiment with only limited control of variables. At the same time, drawing from their humanities and literary-studies roots, scholars in the field read and analyze textual discourse with unusual sensitivity. Unlike those fields, however, Writing Studies finds as much value in reading unfinished student texts in this fashion as it does literary texts—a distinction Robert Scholes has argued strongly distinguishes the values of Literary Criticism and Writing Studies. (33-34)