ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore the legacies of work practices in ex-industrial places to understand what influences young people's attitude to writing, imagined futures and career trajectories, with an emphasis on boys. They diffract school writing though a range of literatures in order to glimpse how past hauntings are part of the ecology of writing practice. The authors explore how legacies of mining community life are entangled with working-class boys' aspirations and the pain of writing. This pain is manifest in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English Language examination results in Wales in which young people who live in poverty do particularly poorly. Embodied knowing is different to what is required to pass an English GCSE. A brief look at the English comprehension examination of the WJEC, the Welsh examination board, demonstrates that the skills of verbal reasoning, inference, deduction and synthesis that derive from propositional logic are required to answer questions on the English comprehension paper.
