Students spend a lot of time writing. Most everyone vividly remembers writing essays for school, and, for many, those memories are not necessarily pleasant. Talk of writing in the classroom often dredges up images of empty pages yawning to be filled, writer's block, and a general uneasiness with the idea of writing in general. The papers we wrote were typically read only by our teachers, and maybe our classmates, after which they disappeared never to be seen again. In Literacy in American Lives, Deborah Brandt explains the origin for some of these uneasy feelings, noting that in her interviews with American families she found that parents tended to encourage their children to read, associating reading with social mobility and learning, while at the same time the act of writing was discouraged and generally associated with shame and fear. Very few of her subjects, many of whom wrote in private, were willing to identify themselves as writers or were comfortable talking about their writing with their families and friends. Brandt's research was limited to American subjects, but she connects this legacy of shame about writing to a history of cultural control, in which governments and churches sought to actively suppress writing instruction, along with the dissent and rebellion that often accompanied public authorship. Despite our dislike for writing in the classroom and the complicated history of writing, people are writing now more than ever.… more