Profession of Letters

• Published in: College composition and communication Vol. 65; no. 1; pp. 40 - 42
• Main Author: Lebduska, Lisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Urbana National Council of Teachers of English 01-09-2013
• Subjects: Computers; Discourse Communities; Grade 5; Grandfathers; Intermediate Grades; Letter writing; Letters; Literacy; Merit Pay; Program Administration; Technology; Video Games; VIGNETTES; Writing; Writing Assignments; Writing Exercises; Writing instruction; Written composition; Written narratives
• ISSN: 0010-096X; 1939-9006
• DOI: 10.58680/ccc201324222

In a drawer of the author's metal desk at Wheaton College, where she teaches writing and direct the writing program, sit several dozen unmailed envelopes with diverse addresses and stamps featuring Buzz Lightyear, the Simpsons, liberty bells, and pine cones. Her first-year students have written these letters to themselves. Immersed in a Wardle and Downs -- inspired semester of writing about writing in which they composed literacy narratives, discourse community ethnographies, and arguments about "good writing," her students cautiously approach this latest task. Her students know about writing to communicate, largely through the technologies that structure their lives. They post regularly to Facebook, traverse campus with plodding text-walks -- heads down, absorbed by their own flying thumbs fluttering above tiny screens. The real change is not so much the loss of a gloried, storied past but rather that the teaching of writing must be fully reciprocal.