Amidst contemplating writerly readers, we are reminded of African American scholar Cornell West’s discussion of the racism, xenophobia, and bias stemming from a television comedy star’s (Roseanne Barr) racist tweet. He commented on one’s responsibility to oneself and the need for empathy for others. Speaking on the importance of having “courage, vision,” and not “conforming to the idols,” he suggested we all need to ...

Prior to the 1980s, reading and writing were more strange bedfellows than soulmates. Reading and writing were viewed quite differently, approached in different ways in schools and scholarly writings, and reading overshadowed writing in terms of its priority. In the most common conceptualization, the one was the complementary undoing of the other; reading was receiving and writing was producing/constructing written language—just as listening was receiving and speaking was constructing oral language. But change was afoot, partially as a result of the growth of interdisciplinarity (Side Comment III.3b.1), but also at the hands of writing scholars who fomented their own revolution. Change was looming as developments in writing processes and pedagogy began experiencing their own zeitgeist with an array of research on writing processes and author-reader relationships. Guiding these developments with the field of English studies were writing theorists and pedagogists, such as James Moffatt, Donald Murray, Donald Graves, Peter Elbow, Mina Shaughnessy, and Janet Emig. Parallel to the work in English studies were comparable catalysts with cognitive psychology—Linda Flower and John Hayes—with alliances with rhetoricians, sociolinguists and scholars in artificial intelligence, such as James Kinneavy, Richard Enos, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell.. ...