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A probing and prescient consideration of writing as an instrument of punishment
 
Writing tends to be characterized as a positive aspect of literacy that helps us to express our thoughts, to foster interpersonal communication, and to archive ideas. However, there is a vast array of evidence that emphasizes the counterbelief that writing has the power to punish, shame, humiliate, control, dehumanize, fetishize, and transform those who are subjected to it. In Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life, Spencer Schaffner looks at many instances of writing as punishment, including forced tattooing, drunk shaming, court-ordered letters of apology, and social media shaming, with the aim of bringing understanding and recognition to the coupling of literacy and subjection.
 
Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life is a fascinating inquiry into how sinister writing can truly be and directly questions the educational ideal that powerful writing is invariably a public good. While Schaffner does look at the darker side of writing, he neither vilifies nor supports the practice of writing as punishment. Rather, he investigates the question with humanistic inquiry and focuses on what can be learned from understanding the many strange ways that writing as punishment is used to accomplish fundamental objectives in everyday life.
 
Through five succinct case studies, we meet teachers, judges, parents, sex traffickers, and drunken partiers who have turned to writing because of its presumed power over writers and readers. Schaffner provides careful analysis of familiar punishments, such as schoolchildren copying lines, and more bizarre public rituals that result in ink-covered bodies and individuals forced to hold signs in public.
 
Schaffner argues that writing-based punishment should not be dismissed as benign or condemned as a misguided perversion of writing, but instead should be understood as an instrument capable of furthering both the aims of justice and degradation.

Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts. Some are written: memos, rejection letters, even resignation letters. Some are not: anecdotes, protests, jokes, parodies.

All of these texts have in common the imperative of disguise, represented as the most crucial consequence of dominant discourse, within which subordination might speak only by knowing its place, and write only by producing hidden transcripts.

Caustic, pointed, satiric, Writing in Disguise is an engaging critique of aspects of academia involving the misuse, misappropriation, and misappreciation of verbal communication in its many guises.

In one of the few book-length studies of a major post-secondary writing-across-the-curriculum initiative from concept to implementation, Writing-Intensive traces the process of preparation for new writing requirements across the undergraduate curriculum at Simon Fraser University, a mid-sized Canadian research university. As faculty members across campus were selected to pilot writing-intensive courses, and as administrators and committees adjusted the process toward full implementation, planners grounded their pedagogy in genre theory—a new approach for many non-composition faculty. So doing, the initiative aimed to establish a coherent yet rhetorically flexible framework through which students might improve their writing in all disciplines.

Wendy Strachan documents this campus cultural transformation, exploring successes and impasses with equal interest. The study identifies factors to be considered to avoid isolating the teaching of writing in writing-intensive courses; to engender a university-wide culture that naturalizes writing as a vital part of learning across all disciplines; and to keep the teaching of writing organic and reflected upon in a scholarly manner across campus.

A valuable case history for scholars in writing studies, WAC/WID, and curricular change studies.