Discipline and publish: Reading and writing the scholarly network

I would like to begin this chapter with a call to my colleagues in Writing Studies to recognize the importance of writing. There is a sense, of course, in which such a call is absurd: One might reply to my call by pointing out the thousands of writing courses we oversee annually, or the thousands of pages of scholarship published and/or presented about various aspects of writing each year. A great deal of the research that we do in this fi eld is devoted to understanding, describing, and explaining the writing that others do, and our day-to-day lives in institutions of higher learning are taken up with prompting, improving, and supporting the students with whom we work. A call to recognize the importance of writing, given its ubiquity in our professional lives, can only ever be facetious, right?.