ENG 101 Glossary

Below is a list of writing studies terms. I have tried to place each term in a writing knowledge domain but many terms have overlap and can fit within several categories. I wanted to think more about the types of writing knowledge that are most likely to transfer and the terms and metalanguage of those knowledge areas that could be one focus of a FYC TFT curriculum. I then ask students to consider how each term can help them think about writing across disciplines and in new contexts. How can they apply each term to new writing situations? What knowledge about discourse communities will help me navigate future writing situations?

  • Intertextuality (rhetorical and process knowledge): helps explain how authors design texts and how texts can be designed. Is a tool for rhetorical analysis and provides a frame for thinking about how texts connect and interact with each other.
  • Discourse Communities:
  • Extensive Writing (process): This helps writers understand that writing about content that is unfamiliar can be difficult and require time for research and more drafting.
  • Reflexive Writing (process): This helps students understand that they tend to write well about content they know well or are familiar with. There is potential for students to see how extensive and reflexive connect and ask themselves how they can move extensive materials to a reflexive frame of mind for easier writing.
  • Situational Variables (process): This helps students understand how time requirements, environment, writer emotion and anxiety, writing task can create constraints that require recognizing and managing.
  • Multiliteracies (process and rhetorical):
  • Discourse
  • Primary and Secondary Discourse
  • Semiotic Domain
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Heuristics
  • Writing about Writing (WAW)
  • Writing across the Curriculum (WAC)
  • Writing in the Disciplines (WID)
  • Teaching for Transfer (TFT)
  • Transfer
  • Recontextualization
  • Writing-to-Learn: Students can learn that writing is a tool for thinking and learning and that they can write hundreds of words and then discard them and the writing still had meaning and was very important.
  • Writing-to-Communicate
  • Composing Process
  • Rhetorical Situation
  • For Foss et al. (2014) “rhetoric is the human use of symbols to communicate” or “the use of symbols by humans” (p. 1). They argue that humans create reality through symbols. “Every word choice we make—every perspective we choose to apply—results in seeing the world one way rather than another. In each case, the experience will be different because of the symbols we use to frame it. Because we create our worlds through symbols, changing our symbols changes our worlds” (p. 2).
  • Exigence
  • Kairos
  • Rhetors
  • Audience
  • Genre
  • Constraints
  • Incubation
  • Rhetoric
  • Rhetorical Reading
  • Rhetorical Situations
  • Expressivist Writing
  • Semiotics