In Unfinished Business, Charles Bazerman considers long-standing puzzles in writing studies, from the most fundamental ideas about humans as writers and writing as constituting modern society to the most practical issues of curriculum and teaching. Together, the chapters provide a broad vision of the importance, role, consequences, and means of writing. The opening cluster of chapters places Homo sapiens’ capacity to write within the biological and cultural evolutionary arc. The second cluster of chapters focuses on how writing has extended and transformed our knowledge with major consequences for us as societies and individuals. The third cluster considers how we go about teaching this increasingly important skill that gives people voice in the literate world. The fourth reflects on the values and ethical concerns that pervade the practice and teaching of writing. In his final chapter, Bazerman speculates about where writing and writing instruction may go in the rapidly changing future.

Charles Bazerman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is founder and former chair of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research and former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. He has been a visiting professor in Portugal, Denmark, the Czech Republic, France, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and the US. His books include How I Became the Kind of Writer I Became, A Rhetoric of Literate Action, A Theory of Literate Action, The Languages of Edison’s Light, Shaping Written Knowledge, The Informed Writer, The Handbook of Research on Writing, What Writing Does and How It Does It, and Lifespan Development of Writing Abilities.