ABSTRACT
This chapter title embodies our deep conviction that writing is best understood as a profoundly social act. Even in solitude, even if unaware, the writer carries on an inner dialogue with audiences as well as with past teachers and writers. To pursue the implications of this view, to be deliberate about cultivating a genuine exchange with others, can make the writing process the locus for an ongoing dialogue. This involves the writer in additional perspectives and cultural frameworks and beyond the personal domestication to see again what is strange. How does or how can social context help or hinder in shaping and revising that writing? Many of us have been taught-most particularly in English classes, as LeFevre (1987) suggests-that writing is a solitary act of an autonomous individual. Our experience, current theory, and the data we are examining point to the limitations and even counterproductivity of that view, and the potency of considering the social dimensions of writing. Of course we sit alone to write much of the time. Of course no one can do it for us. LeFevre quotes from Dewey (1927) to make this point: ‘Individuals still do the thinking, desiring, and purposing, but what they think of is the consequence of their behavior upon that of others and that of others upon themselves’ (p. 24). LeFevre (1987) continues:
What is unique about the individual inventor is his or her particular way of interacting with others and with socioculture-as Dewey puts it, ‘a distinctive way of behaving in conjunction with and in connection with other distinctive ways of acting, not a selfenclosed way of acting, independent of everything else!’ (p. 35)
If we recognize the reality of our interactions with others as a force in shaping our writing, we can cultivate these opportunities (LeFevre, 1987, p. 123) and exercise some choice in the midst of the human complexities that inevitably surface when people do sustained work together. In this chapter our focus is on the social interactions that help shape the writing; in Chapter 7 we focus on the writing tasks and the individual writer. Here we foreground the group exchanges that bring the writing to full growth. We do this because we believe that if the human sciences are to have a significant impact on people and situations, then those who
do the research and writing that will make a difference for practice must educate themselves deeply toward that end.
