Writing plays such an important role in education – in the arts, humanities and science, that it can be hard to think about knowledge without thinking about the written word. The great libraries of antiquity and the multistorey buildings of modern universities are tangible symbols of how this written knowledge is valued. As a vital resource in educational institutions, libraries have had to adapt quickly to find their place in the digital world, yet they still house vast amounts of print in journal and book form. Knowledge and information are woven together through the printed word, and the library building is a potent reminder of this (Figure 6.1). But it should already be clear to readers of this book that not all of what we call writing is actually concerned with knowledge. And the converse is true as well: there’s an awful lot we know that isn’t written down, either because we don’t need to, because we can’t capture it in words, or because the medium of writing is somehow inadequate to the task. It’s common to poke fun at people who don’t bother to read instructions, but for many practical tasks being shown how is far more effective – hence the popularity of short instructional videos on YouTube. Basic car maintenance, crafting techniques and household DIY jobs can often easily be followed if we can see how they are done. In other words, many of us prefer the visual mode for solving practical problems and developing new skills or knowledge. This basic understanding of the affordances of different modes now informs the design of many training programmes and support packages, and it is beginning to play an important part in educational settings, too. Quite simply, knowing and learning do not have to depend on the written word.

Figure 6.1 Storing knowledge and information.

Nevertheless, it is tempting to draw a distinction between academic knowledge, associated as it is with such things as school subjects and university degrees, and everyday practical knowledge. In reality, though, distinctions of this sort are hard to uphold. Many sophisticated areas of study need far more than the written word alone can provide, and many sources that are heavily dependent on writing still require illustrations, tables, charts or graphs to communicate their full meaning. Some important areas of knowledge also have an essential practical or applied component. Who would want to rely on a surgeon or a builder who had only read about how to go about things and had no practical experience or period of apprenticeship? But yet, writing does enjoy an intimate relationship with thinking, problem-solving, knowledge building and learning as we saw in Chapter 4. In formal learning contexts, newer subjects like film and media studies, computing and game design may still need the written word, just as they are clearly dependent on other modes of representation too. As scholars of academic literacy have been quick to point out, particular genres and writing styles are closely connected with how subject knowledge is recorded, represented and assessed. Learning the conventions of academic writing is, therefore, an important part of subject study.

In what follows I explore the relationship between writing and knowledge in more detail. I want to think about how and why writing came to play such an important role in knowledge practices and to look more closely at academic subject writing. But I also want to think about everyday non-academic knowledge practices as well as those in which what is written is seen as the final word – the truth itself. I suggest that genre theory and ideas from ‘new rhetoric’¹ can take us a long way in understanding the relationship between writing and knowledge. But, I also want to suggest that there are certain domains in which the material form of the text is seen as an authority in its own right, and I explore this in relation to sacred texts in the concluding section.

6.1 Learning through Writing

If learning involves understanding, making inferences, and modifying the ways in which we think or act, and if it involves integrating new information into existing knowledge structures, then the writing we produce and the written texts we encounter are likely to play an important part. This has been the basic tenet of formal and compulsory education since its inception. And, as a result of this, school systems have been instrumental in promoting and developing mass literacy. Being able to read and write has come to be seen as the principal route to knowledge and learning, the hallmark of a ‘good’ education, and a gateway to self-improvement and later economic success. Consequently, education, learning and the written word are interwoven in ways that are difficult to disentangle. However, if we take the definition of learning I offered above as a starting point, it’s relatively easy to see that the written word need not be the sole or necessary condition for learning. Although contemporary schooling is heavily dependent on the written word, there are many aspects of educational experience and curriculum learning that use other representational modes and develop other ways of understanding and responding to the world.

Even though it often traces the contours of socially and culturally accepted knowledge structures – both formal and informal ones, it is also the case that learning happens in highly personal and unpredictable ways. For instance, an event experienced in everyday life may well serve to reinforce something we have learnt in more abstract academic study – and vice versa. Most formal education is predicated on what can be referred to as subject learning, and involves quite specific forms or genres of writing, but learning by definition requires a process of integration and this may be highly personal and unpredictable in character. We might well be reading for enjoyment, for entertainment or relaxation but still be building our stock of knowledge or adapting our world view in some way or another. For example, Audrey McGee’s book The Colony² is a fictional narrative set on a remote island off mainland Ireland, yet through it we learn about the Irish Language, its history and the political background surrounding its persecution and demise. The novel gives us an intimate understanding of ethnolinguistic vitality in the Celtic fringe of Europe without ever having to mobilize those particular phrases and expressions. Of course, it does more than that, too – as all good writing does, but I use this as an example of an alternative way of building knowledge that is not dependent on disciplinary writing.

Writing technology, as we have seen, is used to store information, to organize ideas and to communicate with others, and because it is used in this way it has come to act as an important storehouse of knowledge (Figure 6.1). Familiarity with writing gives us access to this storehouse. As the French theorist Michel Serres explains, writing is a

Here Serres eloquently evokes the mnemonic function of the written word, celebrating its potential for storing information and knowledge – and he traces this from early epigraphy through to the digital archive of contemporary times. He conjures up the idea of written knowledge as a vast cultural resource for learning and knowing.

6.2 A Republic of Letters

The special relationship that writing has with knowledge and education has evolved over time and, in its current and dominant form, can be traced back in European history through the rise of humanism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to what is sometimes referred to as The Age of Reason. This era was associated with a growing enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, a belief in social and cultural progress, and a gradual separation of church and civic affairs. The latter point is significant because it meant that knowledge was no longer exclusively governed by ecclesiastical authority; intellectual inquiry and critical debate could, as a result, range more freely. In tandem with this, the increased availability of cheap paper and easy access to printing presses meant that philosophical and scientific ideas could be widely circulated in print form – in books, journals and pamphlets. This, coupled with the emergence of a scholarly and scientific elite composed of physicians, professors, lawyers and courtiers constituted a transnational community, establishing what is sometimes referred to as a ‘republic of letters’, based on exchanging and debating ideas, complete texts as well as work in progress.

The expression Respublica litterati (republic of letters)⁴ is said to have been coined by the early fifteenth-century Italian humanist Francesco Barbaro in response to the rediscovery of texts by ancient Roman authors, and the phrase has been used since then to refer both to the letter writing of academics and the circulation and critical discussion of texts. During the sixteenth century, scholars were beginning to exchange information on a wide range of topics including the results of medical experiments, astronomical observations and descriptions of different flora and fauna. The republic of letters is usually conceived of as a European phenomenon, but recent scholarship shows a similar movement in the Islamic world – monographs, lexicons and encyclopaedia accompanied a thirst for knowledge and the growth of substantial library collections in Central Asia, Egypt and North Africa.⁵ Similar developments also took place in North America and the scholar Martin Puchner⁶ evokes the notion of a republic of letters to describe the printing and publishing work of Benjamin Franklin and his associates. There is no reason to assume that parallel developments did not happen elsewhere, too. However, the emergent codification of print knowledge in Europe was widely disseminated and imposed on other cultures, across large swathes of Asia and the Global South through colonization, and it is now the case that this print-based approach to knowledge, and the academic writing practices it involves, is widely accepted, and forms the backbone of most contemporary educational systems.

As a result, contemporary knowledge production is dependent upon highly specialized writing practices – practices that have an intimate relationship with the English language. Education systems and the academic writing practices that hold them in place have been transformed through global connectivity, and the English language has become a sort of academic lingua franca. This is, of course, related to the growing dominance of English as a global language fuelled by the economic power and political influence of the United States. This language dominance has led to what could be seen as a ‘politics of location’,⁷ which favours Anglophone scholars working in Anglophone contexts – a situation which effortlessly reproduces itself. Although there is an abundance of written communication and transnational exchange in the contemporary academic community, the inequity associated with this politics of location suggests that we should be cautious about describing the contemporary knowledge economy as part of a ‘republic’ of letters.

Nonetheless, the notion of a republic of letters is worth dwelling on if it can capture something of the way in which writing became a vital conduit for knowledge practices through European history. Because thoughts, theories and discoveries could be compressed and stored in writing, and because an infrastructure for distributing texts and receiving comments developed, the conditions were right for the exchange of print-based material. There is no reason to doubt that many of those involved believed in an altruistic ideal, based on a reciprocal, transnational exchange of ideas and that they also believed in the improvements and progress that it promised, but the republic of letters signalled the rise of a wealthy intellectual elite who were by no means blind to the power and influence they wielded. So was it a republic? It is perhaps better thought of as a social network, because it seems clear that it was initially dominated by the privileged, by those with spare time, the financial means to support their activities and ready access to the technologies of writing and distribution. I’m not suggesting then that there was a single pivotal moment which launched us into the modern era of print knowledge, but rather that social, economic and material developments combined over time to shape and produce many of the knowledge practices that we are familiar with today. In the end, the idea of a republic of letters may seem like a romantic notion but it is still evoked. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the historian Katharina Volk⁸ has recently used the idea to describe intellectual activity and scholarship in late Roman times, whilst a number of contemporary scholars have evoked the same concept to describe scholarship in the digital age.

This isn’t the place for a full history of the development of dominant knowledge practices yet the overview that I have sketched out suggests that it is unlikely that there were significant moments when the relationship between knowledge and writing coalesced – instead a gradual evolution took place, helped along by the emergence of communities of scholars, in their interaction and through their correspondence. Technologies of writing, publication and distribution undoubtedly played a significant role, too. These were not exactly historical accidents, but they were the product of social, cultural and material changes which when coupled with colonial expansion and political dominance led to the establishment of written English as the universal language of science and academic knowledge.

At this point in the discussion, it may seem to the reader as if I have proceeded through a long list of excuses, caveats and hesitations to get at the relationship between writing and knowledge, but I have done this in order to underline the fact that current practices are not in any sense given or inevitable, rather they are the result of a co-emergence of particular conditions. Further to this, I hope to have shown that these conditions worked to privilege certain kinds of knowing, distinctive modes of expression and specific social and linguistic groups. Before moving on, it may also be necessary to be a little bit more specific about what I have referred to so far in this section as knowledge practices. By knowledge practices, I mean to include the totality of actions and interactions involved in the rehearsal, revision and development of ways of knowing. This includes the production of specific spaces (fields of study, laboratories and so on), the materials involved (such as the apparatus and instruments that are used), the ways in which observations are recorded, refined and analyzed, as well as the processes by which particular kinds of evidence are used to make claims to knowledge within a specific community. Knowledge practices enact different kinds of inclusion and exclusion, arbitrate on what is relevant or irrelevant, and in so doing generate quite specific kinds of statements and arguments. Such statements are shaped and purified through the technologies of writing and distribution, entering a further stage of interpretation in the wider communities of practice they encounter.⁹ It is the texts that are produced through these practices and processes that constitute academic or subject-based writing.

6.3 Academic Writing

Regardless of our perspective on the origins and development of academic writing, it seems fairly obvious that different kinds of writing are a distinguishing feature of different branches of knowledge. Put quite simply, the textual conventions we encounter in something like an engineering proposal are radically different from an account of a psychological experiment or a cultural analysis of 1960s’ horror movies. The sheer diversity of literate practices in different subject disciplines has been a focus for researchers and theorists for over fifty years. Most scholars now seem to agree that knowledge and its subject disciplines have become increasingly specialized, whilst simultaneously blurring and mixing at the boundaries, particularly with the advance of interdisciplinary study. Genre, understood as a conventional text type, a way of using language that is recognisable to those familiar with a particular domain, has established itself as the dominant theoretical and methodological perspective for investigating academic writing, as well as a way of accounting for the wider academic literacy practices in which it is embedded, as we see in what follows.

At first sight, the notion of genre seems to suggest that the key to unlock academic writing might be to map the linguistic conventions that distinguish one kind of writing from another. We might, for instance, look at the ways in which the texts associated with a subject are organized (their macrostructure), the ways in which textual structures are sequenced, the sort of statements or claims associated with that particular subject, the sentence structures typically adopted, the vocabulary choices made and so on. This sort of analysis has in fact informed some approaches to teaching ‘text types’ – perhaps most commonly found in primary education,¹⁰ and often derived from the ground-breaking work of the linguist, Michael Halliday.¹¹ However, there are a number of difficulties in adopting this narrow linguistic approach to genre. Firstly, as a classroom approach genre can easily be reduced to a set of rules, a style sheet if you like, used to produce formulaic writing in which content becomes arbitrary, and disconnected from authentic study. Secondly, this approach seems to suggest that there are a finite set of genres and that they are somehow fixed. This seems unlikely: as new academic subjects take shape and new kinds of interdisciplinary work are produced, new kinds of writing evolve – and, what’s more, we can also trace how different kinds of academic writing have changed over time. Thirdly, if we are not careful, such an approach implies that meaning resides in the text itself, rather than in extended dialogue with the individuals and institutions who mediate textual interpretation and contribute to the broader web of knowledge practices. Finally, a narrow approach to genre may overlook other important dimensions, such as the ways in which place and space influence how writing is produced and interpreted, and the material form or appearance of written documents. In other words, when genre is narrowly defined, it suggests a kind of stability of textual form which may not be particularly helpful.

Clearly, we need a more sophisticated and robust account of genre if it is to be useful as a conceptual approach. Mindful of the shortcomings of early understandings, some scholars have developed an orientation to genre that leans more in the direction of rhetoric. Derived from its historical concerns with persuasion, this orientation turns us towards the intentions and purposes of writers, the position they take, how they establish credibility and the strategies they use to recruit or align with their audience. Writers address the rhetorical situation by offering pathways through texts that guide the thought and emotions of the reader.¹² In this sense an emphasis on the rhetorical dimension orients us to the politics of communication. Although genres remain relatively stable in this model, the attention is shifted to how writers make choices that signal their beliefs, how they address audiences and how they orientate to wider contexts as they structure the reader’s experience.

In a further iteration, the fixity of genre is challenged at a more fundamental level. Genres become something more like a set of shared expectations about how texts may be used – but these expectations are located in a constellation of practices that revolve around a shared purpose. Charles Bazerman, a leading exponent of this approach, sometimes referred to as the ‘new rhetoric’, following this line of reasoning recasts the understanding of genres in terms of ‘ways of being’ or ‘frames for social action’.¹³ As a result genres become mutable, dynamic and always sensitive to the socio-historical conditions of their production and consumption. This approach can account for why classroom texts produced in different historical or geographical contexts may vary so significantly even, when the subject content may be comparable. It also accounts for why a scientific report produced by a classroom student differs, quite fundamentally, to one produced for an academic journal. Academic writing, from this point of view, becomes part of a much broader context that includes the cognitive, social and material dimensions of specific knowledge practices – the totality of human and non-human interactions. This, in effect, brings us full circle – to an understanding of how knowledge and writing are so closely interwoven. To put it another way, we could say that academic writing plays an important role in many formal knowledge practices, but that it can only be fully understood in the wider context of those knowledge structures and practices.

6.4 Non-academic Writing

As has already been acknowledged, not all ways of knowing fall into the sort of subject or disciplinary categories that we can identify in formal education. What we might call professional, practical or everyday knowledge are good examples. This begs the question of how we might account for the writing associated with topic areas that are less formal, and less bounded by institutional processes. Before embarking on this topic, however, it’s important to reflect a little further on the notion of academic writing that has been developed in the previous section. I want to acknowledge here, that with the diversification of education, and with the growth of interest in technical and vocational learning, some activities and occupations that had previously been seen as ‘simply practical’, or exclusively tied to a workplace or domestic setting, have now come to include elements of learning – some that are accredited and some that have found a place in educational provision. So this troubles, or perhaps softens, the boundary between academic/non-academic writing. I return to this concern at the end of the section, following an exploration of non-academic writing.

Let’s begin with some examples of non-academic writing. We might think of a loose category such as lifecourse writing – books, pamphlets, leaflets and online texts, that pass on knowledge about such things as pregnancy or weaning, those on marriage and relationships, planning for retirement and so on. Typically such texts provide a mixture of guidance, advice and factual information. Then there are all the different kinds of writing that we might use to help us solve practical tasks in home maintenance and decoration, to address computer problems, to support amateur gardeners and so on. Or, if we want to build up our knowledge and understanding of a new environment, we may well consult maps, brochures or travel guides. And if we’re a hiker or biker, a climber or snowboarder we’ll probably need more specific information on routes and trails. Our expectations of what these different texts might look like are surprisingly clear. We already have a sense of what to expect, and also quite quickly develop ways of navigating them so that we can focus on the precise information we need. Many of these kinds of writing now exist in both print and digital formats, and although navigational devices may differ in these media, there are arguably more textual similarities than differences between the two formats. All this begs the question of whether the sorts of theoretical and methodological orientations explored when we considered academic writing can be used in the same way to understand how such writing works.

The short answer is that they definitely can. In fact, a lot of work in genre theory has focused on everyday writing. Such texts can be quite clearly associated with ways of being and particular types of behaviour. Not only that, but the sort of positions taken by the authors, the values they embrace and the ways they may try to engender a particular perspective – the rhetorical dimensions of these texts – can often seem to be quite close to the surface. For instance, comparing a Lonely Planet travel book with a Berlitz Pocket Guide quickly reveals a difference in orientation. A Berlitz Pocket Guide foregrounds a traditional view of culture and history, focuses on sights to see and specific itineraries, whereas the Lonely Planet, deeply rooted in a backpacker ethos, spends more time on understanding authentic local experience, identifying accommodation that is simple and cheap and always emphasizes the most economical ways of moving on from one place to the next. At the same time, both of these travel guide series include background information, advice on what to see and do, where to stay and where to eat, but they work to shape contrasting tourist identities.¹⁴

Cookbooks and recipes are another source of everyday practical knowledge with a clear emphasis on practical, embodied material experience. The emphasis may be on culinary entertainment (the dinner party), on eating quickly, cheaply, or simply staying healthy, but readers still expect similar basic information. We expect to find ingredients – usually in a list that provides information on quantity; a clear and sequenced guide to preparation with plenty of command sentences and imperative verbs (such as ‘chop’, ‘boil’, ‘add’ and so on); as well as fairly strong indications of how long the dish will take, what temperature to cook it at and how many portions we are likely to get. But recipe texts do still differ in the value systems they evoke. For example, the award-winning Bosh cookbook¹⁵ clearly flies the flag for a plant-based diet. It takes a rhetorical position that emphasizes health, and culinary creativity, drawing eclectically from different cultural traditions. Avoiding any direct critique of the food industry, its impact on the environment or the animal rights issues surrounding the dairy industry, the authors sidestep anything that may seem too political or too controversial. The orientation is signalled in the introductory quote ‘I mocked Ian when he went vegan’ but ‘After cutting out animal products entirely. Both of us felt fantastic’ (p. 8). Who could argue with feeling fantastic? This follows through in recipe descriptions which describe ‘delicious sweet potatoes’, ‘the goodness of risotto’, ‘a healthy bake’ and so on (the underlining is my own). In other words, the cookbook promotes a nourishing and healthy diet that makes you feel good.

In common with academic texts, non-academic texts are closely interwoven with a set of sociocultural practices and material conditions – and as the examples above show, with a set of guiding values. In the case of recipes, the referential context also includes knowledge and access to particular kinds of kitchens, specific items of kitchen equipment, particular culinary actions and the ready availability of certain ingredients. In this way, a cookbook, or an online recipe, is embedded in a culturally and historically defined set of practices. At this level of generality then, it seems that there may be little to distinguish between academic and non-academic writing. Texts are embedded in a constellation of practices that involve specific ways of being and specific ways of doing things. In the final analysis, however, it would appear that academic texts are characterized by degrees of complexity and specialization and to knowledge practices that are to a large extent controlled by educational institutions and processes. Academic texts make sense within institutionalized knowledge practices and hierarchies that have achieved sufficient stability to establish distinctive technical expressions and textual forms as well as particular ways of signalling intertextuality and prior knowledge. Ultimately, a research paper on microbiology is addressed to a relatively small community of initiates, it assumes an audience with more than an entry-level understanding of the topic, and in this sense, it is quite unlike a recipe – which enjoys a much broader appeal and is not dependent on such specific prior knowledge.

6.5 Sacred Knowledge

Writing, then, is associated with many different areas of knowing and being, but in certain social and cultural groups, it is also identified with a belief in ‘the truth’ as expressed in sacred or religious texts. Across the history of world religions, we can trace a strong faith in the sacral power of words, especially in their written form. In theistic religions, this may take the form of a single authoritative text such as the Qur’an or the Bible – sometimes, along with the Tanakh, they are described as religions of the book. But writing also features in other forms of sacral writing such as spells and charms, prayers and hymns or incantations and mantras. Although all of these different kinds of writing could easily be examined from the point of view of genre, I want to treat them as a special category because of the distinctive social and material practices they involve.

We might begin by looking at the central sacred text of the Sikh religion: the Guru Granth Sahib. The Guru Granth Sahib (literally ‘the master book of the Teacher’) is honoured as the material embodiment of the 10 gurus. Copies are, therefore, given special reverence at places of worship and are handled with respect and care as a sacred object. The book itself is often described as a guru – a living guru, and it is placed on a raised platform, covered by an elaborate canopy draped in colourful fabrics. It was originally written in Punjabi using the Gurmukhi script and copies are often ornately decorated. Respect is shown in the ritual treatment of the text through various practices and prohibitions including covering the text with a rumalla (silk cloth) and cooling the air around it with a chaur sahiba (an ornate yak hair whisk). The Guru Granth Sahib, like the sacred texts of other religions, is never placed on the floor and hand hygiene is observed at all times. Although one might conclude that the Guru Granth Sahib, like the disciplinary and non-disciplinary texts we have considered, is intimately tied into ways of being and doing, to knowledge and ritual practice, the authority of the text and the significance of its materiality offers us different insights. The text is itself seen and revered as an embodiment of truth.

In Tibetan Buddhist practice, writing also plays an important part. The distinctive Tibetan script is not only found in temples, in loose-leaf books, but it is also part of the landscape itself. Prayers and invocations in the form of mantras are printed on prayer flags, hung on buildings and around distinctive features in the natural environment. They are painted on walls and etched into stones of all shapes and sizes. Often these stones are collected together as ‘mani’ walls (see Figure 6.2), using a syllabary that most probably dates back to the seventh century.

Figure 6.2 A Tibetan Mani wall.

Mantra writing, found embossed in metal on prayer wheels and printed and published in a variety of forms has religious power, mediating a relationship between believers and the transcendental world of Buddhas and deities. Interestingly, this is a kind of writing that isn’t read in the conventional sense, functioning more like a prayer or a blessing, and sometimes it is quite literally moved by the action of the elements – by wind or water (in the case of prayer flags and water-powered prayer wheels). Those who recognize the authority of this writing do not necessarily have to be able to read the mantras themselves¹⁶ but they know how the mantra sounds, and will be able to vocalize it. They may not necessarily be decoding the syllables in the course of their recitations, but the mantra works as a visible language that has spiritual authority.

These examples bring out two important points about writing. The first is the significance of the material form or appearance of writing, and the second is concerned with the authority of the text itself. We can use these points to reflect more generally on the relationship between writing and knowing. Sacral texts may themselves become a focus of reverence in a way that is rarely found in other walks of life. Although we might have high regard for an academic writer and think of a particular volume as a touchstone – even giving it pride of place on our bookshelf, it would be very unusual – eccentric even, to treat it as the embodiment of truth. The same, of course, could be said for journals and articles. There is no disputing the fact that we regard some texts, and some writers as authoritative but we place limits on that, and (unless we are a collector) the particular format, edition or translation is a matter of taste rather than an absolute judgement. But it’s not as if the material form and how we treat it is completely irrelevant. How we display, store and categorize written texts is still significant in other contexts, too. In the libraries I described at the beginning of this chapter, there are strong conventions that govern how and where writing is stored and important codes of behaviour that govern how we handle texts. For instance, despite the long history of marking and annotating texts from the Medieval use of manicules and lengthy marginalia through to textual highlighting and underlining, such practices are frowned upon in institutional libraries.¹⁷