Description
Book SynopsisInvisible Effects directly engages systems and complexity theory to reveal how the effects of writing and writing instruction work in deferred, disguised, and unexpected ways. The book explains how writing and language that exist in writing systems can indirectly (though powerfully) affect people and environments in sometimes distant contexts. In so doing, the book takes on a question central to rhetoric and writing throughout its long history but perhaps even more pressing today: how do we recognize and measure the e?ects of writing when those effects are so tangled up with our complex material and discursive environments? The surprisingly powerful effects explored here suggest new ways of thinking about and teaching writing and the applications, lessons, and examples in the text precisely model what this thinking and teaching might look like.
This book is primed to serve as an important addition to reading lists of scholars and graduate students in Writing Studies a
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – Introduction. Writing Effects, Complex Systems, and Emergence – Writing Effects, Where No One Notices – Nonlinear Effects in and of the Classroom – Systems Theory, Non-dualism, and the Emergent Commonplace – Complexity and Reduction: Teaching Writing as a Complex System – Conclusion. Systems and (Un)Certainty – Index.
