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Scotland, Britain, Empire takes on a cliché that permeates writing from and about the literature of the Scottish Highlands. Popular and influential in its time, this literature fell into disrepute for circulating a distorted and deforming myth that aided in Scotland’s marginalization by consigning Scottish culture into the past while drawing a mist over harsher realities.

Kenneth McNeil invokes recent work in postcolonial studies to show how British writers of the Romantic period were actually shaping a more complex national and imperial consciousness. He discusses canonical works—the works of James Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott—and noncanonical and nonliterary works—particularly in the fields of historiography, anthropology, and sociology. This book calls for a rethinking of the “romanticization” of the Highlands and shows that Scottish writing on the Highlands reflects the unique circumstances of a culture simultaneously feeling the weight of imperial “anglobalization” while playing a vital role in its inception.

 

While writers from both sides of the Highland line looked to the traditions, language, and landscape of the Highlands to define their national character, the Highlands were deemed the space of the primitive—like other spaces around the globe brought under imperial sway. But this concern with the value and fate of indigenousness was in fact a turn to the modern.

How does literature imagine its own powers of representation? Françoise Meltzer attempts to answer this question by looking at how the portrait—the painted portrait, framed—appears in various literary texts. Alien to the verbal system of the text yet mimetic of the gesture of writing, the textual portrait becomes a telling measure of literature's views on itself, on the politics of representation, and on the power of writing.

Meltzer's readings of textual portraits—in the Gospel writers and Huysmans, Virgil and Stendhal, the Old Testament and Apuleius, Hawthorne and Poe, Kafka and Rousseau, Walter Scott and Mme de Lafayette—reveal an interplay of control and subversion: writing attempts to veil the visual and to erase the sensual in favor of "meaning," while portraiture, with its claims to bringing the natural object to "life," resists and eludes such control. Meltzer shows how this tension is indicative of a politics of repression and subversion intrinsic to the very act of representation. Throughout, she raises and illuminates fascinating issues: about the relation of flattery to caricature, the nature of the uncanny, the relation of representation to memory and history, the narcissistic character of representation, and the interdependency of representation and power.

Writing, thinking, speaking, dreaming, acting—the extent to which these are all controlled by representation must, Meltzer concludes, become "consciously unconscious." In the textual portrait, she locates the moment when this essential process is both revealed and repressed.

From 2004 to 2009, the Albuquerque Journal North ran the ¡ÓRALE! SANTA FE column by Santa Fe native and veteran journalist Arnold Vigil. The editor gave carte blanche to Vigil in his selection of topics ranging from encounters with locals and tourists to social commentary about changes that have taken place over the years. Vigil’s local perspective and humorous insights about Santa Fe, its inhabitants, and visitors struck a chord with readers—native Nuevomexicanos and long-time residents alike. Despite its popularity, the column was discontinued as a result of the economic downturn.

Frank Farmer has contributed important essays to the study of Bakhtin in composition, and in Saying and Silence he gathers some of those, along with several new essays, into a single volume. Scholars who specialize in Bakhtin will find this work engaging, but equally Farmer wants to explicate and apply Bakhtin for readers whose focus is teaching or some other nonspecialist dimension of writing scholarship.

Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.

For more than fifty years, authors, editors, and publishers in the scientific community have turned to Scientific Style and Format for authoritative recommendations on all matters of writing style and citation. Developed by the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the leading professional association in science publishing, this indispensable guide encompasses all areas of the sciences. Now in its eighth edition, it has been fully revised to reflect today’s best practices in scientific publishing.

 

Scientific Style and Format citation style has been comprehensively reorganized, and its style recommendations have been updated to align with the advice of authoritative international bodies. Also new to the eighth edition are guidelines and examples for citing online images and information graphics, podcasts and webcasts, online videos, blogs, social networking sites, and e-books. Style instructions for physics, chemistry, genetics, biological sciences, and astronomy have been adjusted to reflect developments in each field. The coverage of numbers, units, mathematical expressions, and statistics has been revised and now includes more information on managing tables, figures, and indexes. Additionally, a full discussion of plagiarism and other aspects of academic integrity is incorporated, along with a complete treatment of developments in copyright law, including Creative Commons.
 

For the first time in its history, Scientific Style and Format will be available simultaneously in print and online at www.scientificstyleandformat.org. Online subscribers will receive access to full-text searches of the new edition and other online tools, as well as the popular Chicago Manual of Style Online Forum, a community discussion board for editors and authors. Whether online or in print, the eighth edition of Scientific Style and Format remains the essential resource for those writing, editing, and publishing in the scientific community.

Screenwriting for Neurotics is a quirky and accessible handbook for beginning screenwriters. Whether you are a student in a screenwriting class or just someone who wants to try their hand at writing for film or television, this handy guidebook makes the entire process simple and unintimidating. Scott Winfield Sublett, a veteran screenwriter and screenwriting teacher, walks you step by step from start to finish and helps you navigate potential and unforeseen difficulties along the way, offering handy tips and suggestions to keep you from becoming blocked or stalled.

Rather than throwing you into the writing process headfirst, Sublett guides you through the various decisions you need to make—about plot, character, structure, conflict—in the order you need to make them. He explains in straightforward terms the terminology and jargon, the theory and industry standards, and dispels common myths about screenwriting that can discourage or hold back a beginning writer.

Balancing theory and practice and offering valuable and insightful examples from recognizable and well-known classic and contemporary films, ranging from Casablanca to A Christmas Story to Clerks, Sublett provides the new writer with the necessary tools to successfully write a feature-length screenplay and offers a roadmap of where to go next. With an emphasis on helping a writer not just to begin, but also to finish a script, Screenwriting for Neurotics is the screenwriting book to help you actually write one.

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to “write” books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception—indeed, the authorship—of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena.

 

History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe’s work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.

Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.

In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity.

In published scholarship and research, the path toward discovery seems clean and direct. The dead ends, backtrackings, start-overs, and stumbles that occur throughout the research process are elided, and seems that the researchers started at point A and arrived safely and neatly at point B without incident, as if by magic. The path, however, is never truly clear and straight. Research and writing is messy. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research features chapters from twenty-three writing scholars who have experienced moments of serendipity in their own work—not by magic or pure chance but through openness and active waiting, which offer an opportunity to prepare the mind.

Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research illustrates the reality of doing research: there is no reliable prescription or one-size-fits-all manual, but success can be found with focused dedication and an open mind.

Contributors: Ellen Barton​, ​Zachary C. Beare​, ​Lynn Z. Bloom​, ​Jennifer Clary-Lemon​, ​Caren Wakerman Converse​, ​Gale Coskan-Johnson​, ​Kim Donehower​, ​Bill Endres​, ​Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield​, ​Lynée Lewis Gaillet​, ​Brad Gyori​, ​Judy Holiday​, ​Gesa E. Kirsch​, ​Lori Ostergaard​, ​Doreen Piano​, ​Liz Rohan​, ​Ryan Skinnell​, ​Patricia Wilde​, ​Daniel Wuebben

During the early twentieth century, Shanghai was the center of China's new media culture. Described by the modernist writer Mu Shiying as "transplanted from Europe" and “paved with shadows,” for many of its residents Shanghai was a city without a past paradoxically haunted by the absent past’s traces. In Shadow Modernism William Schaefer traces how photographic practices in Shanghai provided a forum within which to debate culture, ethnicity, history, and the very nature of images. The central modernist form in China, photography was neither understood nor practiced as primarily a medium for realist representation; rather, photo layouts, shadow photography, and photomontage rearranged and recomposed time and space, cutting apart and stitching places, people, and periods together in novel and surreal ways. Analyzing unknown and overlooked photographs, photomontages, cartoons, paintings, and experimental fiction and poetry, Schaefer shows how artists and writers used such fragmentation and juxtaposition to make visible the shadows of modernity in Shanghai: the violence, the past, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity excluded and repressed by the prevailing cultural politics of the era and yet hidden in plain sight.

In Simple & Direct, Jacques Barzun, celebrated author and educator, distills from a lifetime of writing and teaching his thoughts about the craft of writing. In chapters on diction, syntax, tone, meaning, composition, and revision, Barzun describes and prescribes the techniques to correct even the most ponderous style. Exercises, model passages — both literary and unorthodox — and hundreds of often amusing examples of usage gone wrong demonstrate the process of making intelligent choices and guide us toward developing strong and distinctive prose.

Social media have been (for quite some time now) part of the fabric of our lives. But as with many new technologies, it often takes a while for us to be able to step back, assess the tool's impact, and consider what's next. This collection offers one of the first sets of scholarly work in our field that responds to social media's influence on both popular and extra-curricular writing as well as on scholarly communication. Too frequently, social media is dismissed as non-academic, unworthy of sustained attention by researchers. The authors featured here present compelling reasons why this oft-neglected form of writing deserves—and demands—continued academic response.

Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies makes this contribution by examining the impact of social media on three writing-related themes: publics and audiences, presentation of self and groups, and pedagogy at various levels of higher education. The contributors to this collection urge readers to pay attention to an undertheorized aspect of writing online—the acts of composing that occur specifically in social-media spaces. Organized in three sections—social media and public audiences; social media and presentation; and social media and pedagogy—it builds on previous explorations of the role of multimodality in composition studies by extending ongoing conversations that have asked readers to expand notions of literacy in the twenty-first century. By addressing the wide range of composing activities that take place in social media and the rich variety of genres, audiences, stylistic choices, and pedagogical possibilities, this collection offers an important contribution to our understanding of pedagogy and practice in social media spaces.

Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures describes a multiyear project to develop a writing curriculum within the College of Engineering that satisfied the cultural needs of both compositionists and engineers at a large R1 university. Employing intercultural communication theory and an approach to interdisciplinary collaboration that involved all parties, cross-disciplinary colleagues were able to develop useful descriptions of the process of integrating writing with engineering; overcoming conflicts and misunderstandings about the nature of writing, gender bias, hard science versus soft science tensions; and many other challenges.
 
This volume represents the collective experiences and insights of writing consultants involved in the large-scale curriculum reform of the entire College of Engineering; they collaborated closely with faculty members of the various departments and taught writing to engineering students in engineering classrooms. Collaborators developed syllabi that incorporated writing into their courses in meaningful ways, designed lessons to teach various aspects of writing, created assignments that integrated engineering and writing theory and concepts, and worked one-on-one with students to provide revision feedback. Though interactions were sometimes tense, the two groups––writing and engineering––developed a “third culture” that generally placed students at the center of learning.
 
Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures provides a guide to successful collaborations with STEM faculty that will be of interest to WPAs, instructors, and a range of both composition scholars and practitioners seeking to understand more about the role of writing and communication in STEM disciplines.
 
Contributors:
Linn K. Bekins, Sarah A. Bell, Mara K. Berkland, Doug Downs, April A. Kedrowicz, Sarah Read, Julie L. Taylor, Sundy Watanabe

Solving Problems in Technical Communication collects the latest research and theory in the field and applies it to real-world problems faced by practitioners—problems involving ethics, intercultural communication, new media, and other areas that determine the boundaries of the discipline. The book is structured in four parts, offering an overview of the field, situating it historically and culturally, reviewing various theoretical approaches to technical communication, and examining how the field can be advanced by drawing on diverse perspectives. Timely, informed, and practical, Solving Problems in Technical Communication will be an essential tool for undergraduates and graduate students as they begin the transition from classroom to career.

Now it is my turn to stand. At Acoma Pueblo meetings, members rise and announce their intention to speak. In that moment they are recognized and heard. In Speaking for the Generations, Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz brings together contemporary Native American writers to take their turn. Each offers an evocation of herself or himself, describing the personal, social, and cultural influences on her or his development as a writer. Although each writer's viewpoint is personal and unique, together they reflect the rich tapestry of today's Native literature.

Of varied backgrounds, the writers represent Indian heritages and cultures from the Pacific Northwest to the northern plains, from Canada to Guatemala. They are poets, novelists, and playwrights. And although their backgrounds are different and their statements intensely personal, they share common themes of their relationship to the land, to their ancestors, and to future generations of their people. From Gloria Bird's powerful recounting of personal and family history to Esther Belin's vibrant tale of her urban Native homeland in Los Angeles, these writers reveal the importance of place and politics in their lives. Leslie Marmon Silko calls upon the ancient tradition of Native American storytelling and its role in connecting the people to the land. Roberta J. Hill and Elizabeth Woody ponder some of the absurdities of contemporary Native life, while Guatemalan Victor Montejo takes readers to the Mayan world, where a native culture had writing and books long before Europeans came.

Together these pieces offer an inspiring portrait of what it means to be a Native writer in the twentieth century. With passion and urgency, these writers are speaking for themselves, for their land, and for the generations.

Essays on the art and craft of writing by some of the nation’s finest writers make up this rich collection, from Louise Bogan’s meditation on popular and unpopular poetry, to Saul Bellow’s assessment of the future of fiction, to Francie du Plessix Gray’s reflection on womenand Russian literature. Spanning five decades of writing, the essays address topics both timely and timeless in nature, and cover both the process and the product of writing.
 
These essays were originally presented at the Hopwood Lecture series at the University of Michigan in conjunction with the annual awarding of the Hopwood Prizes in creative writing. The internationally recognized awards are granted by the bequest of playwright Avery Hopwood (1884-1928), who sought to encourage student work in the fields of dramatic writing, fiction, poetry, and the essay. The essays speak to the apprentice writer, finding their focus in a twinned discussion of the craft of prose and the art of poetry. The authors share an assumption that literature matters, and vitally, to the culture it reports on and sustains.
 

In 1968, Michel Foucault agreed to a series of interviews with critic Claude Bonnefoy, which were to be published in book form. Bonnefoy wanted a dialogue with Foucault about his relationship to writing rather than about the content of his books. The project was abandoned, but a transcript of the initial interview survived and is now being published for the first time in English. In this brief and lively exchange, Foucault reflects on how he approached the written word throughout his life, from his school days to his discovery of the pleasure of writing.

Wide ranging, characteristically insightful, and unexpectedly autobiographical, the discussion is revelatory of Foucault’s intellectual development, his aims as a writer, his clinical methodology (“let’s say I’m a diagnostician”), and his interest in other authors, including Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud. Foucault discloses, in ways he never had previously, details about his home life, his family history, and the profound sense of obligation he feels to the act of writing. In his Introduction, Philippe Artières investigates Foucault’s engagement in various forms of oral discourse—lectures, speeches, debates, press conferences, and interviews—and their place in his work.

Speech Begins after Death shows Foucault adopting a new language, an innovative autobiographical communication that is neither conversation nor monologue, and is one of his most personal statements about his life and writing.

Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and improvisatory world of spiritual literature.

In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir—from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: they must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. Only when the writer’s craft prevails can the fleeting and profound personal truths of the spirit be captured. Like its predecessor, Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist,Spirituality and the Writer will find a home in writing classrooms and book groups, and be a resource for students, teachers, and writers who seek guidance with exploring their spiritual lives.

Winner of the 2016 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 CCCC Research Impact Award 

In Still Life with Rhetoric, Laurie Gries forges connections among new materialism, actor network theory, and rhetoric to explore how images become rhetorically active in a digitally networked, global environment. Rather than study how an already-materialized “visual text” functions within a specific context, Gries investigates how images often circulate and transform across media, genre, and location at viral rates. A four-part case study of Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image elucidates how images reassemble collective life as they actualize in different versions, enter into various relations, and spark a firework of activity across the globe.

While intent on tracking the rhetorical life of a single, multiple image, Still Life with Rhetoric is most concerned with studying rhetoric in motion. To account for an image’s widespread circulation and emergent activities, Gries introduces iconographic tracking—a digital research method for tracing an image’s divergent rhetorical becomings. Yet Gries also articulates a dynamic set of theoretical principles for studying rhetoric as a distributed, generative, and unforeseeable event that is applicable beyond the study of visual rhetoric. With an eye toward futurity—the strands of time beyond a thing’s initial moment of production and delivery—Still Life with Rhetoric intends to be taken up by those interested in visual rhetoric, research methods, and theory.

From the work of the New Journalists in the 1960s, to the New Yorker essays of John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Atul Gawande, and a host of others, to blockbuster book-length narratives such as Mary Roach’s Stiff or Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, narrative nonfiction has come into its own. Yet writers looking for guidance on reporting and writing true stories have had few places to turn for advice. Now in Storycraft, Jack Hart, a former managing editor of the Oregonian who guided several Pulitzer Prize–winning narratives to publication, delivers what will certainly become the definitive guide to the methods and mechanics of crafting narrative nonfiction.

Hart covers what writers in this genre need to know, from understanding story theory and structure, to mastering point of view and such basic elements as scene, action, and character, to drafting, revising, and editing work for publication. Revealing the stories behind the stories, Hart brings readers into the process of developing nonfiction narratives by sharing tips, anecdotes, and recommendations he forged during his decades-long career in journalism. From there, he expands the discussion to other well-known writers to show the broad range of texts, styles, genres, and media to which his advice applies. With examples that draw from magazine essays, book-length nonfiction narratives, documentaries, and radio programs, Storycraft will be an indispensable resource for years to come.