Collin Brooke and Jeffrey Grabill, “Writing is a Technology Through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning”

Brooke, Collin, and Jeffrey T. Grabill. “Writing is a Technology Through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning.”  Naming What We Know. Logan: Utah State UP, 2015. Print.

Summary: Brooke and Grail argue that writing is a technology that we’ve interiorized as a means for complex thought. The technology of writing also creates new rhetorical communication contexts, opportunities for social relationships, and different affordances through different media.

Keywords: writing, technology, media

Quotations:

1. “The audience for such writing must similarly devote material resources to understanding it, even if simply in the form of attention. Meaning doesn’t just happen” (33).
2. “Media carry different affordances” (33).

Questions:

1. The tools/media used create a communication context in which the communicators/recipients have certain expectations based on the convention. How does this shift when dealing with a new technology, and the conventions are not widely known?

Citations:

1. Richards, I. A. 2001. Principles of Literacy Criticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.