ABSTRACT
Mary Lea and Brian V. Street identified three pedagogical frameworks for academic writing on a continuum from autonomous to ideological models: study skills; academic socialization; and academic literacies. Whether academic writing is taken as a single, generic skill or the specialized practices of discourse communities people are socialized into, style is a key element in representations of writing. In research on composing processes of academic writers, P. Prior and J. Shipka found that environment-selecting-and-structuring practices, “the ways writers tune their environments and get in tune with them, the ways they work to build durable and fleeting contexts for their work, are central practices in literate activity”. Tracing moments across a lifespan, as in Nora’s family car rides, displays the deeply distributed and heterogeneous character of semiotic becoming and laminated assemblage around academic literacies. The contrasting enactments of seemingly similar gestures display that academic writing styles are embodied and affective, registered in gestural metaphors and other embodied actions.
