is an area I’ll be exploring over the next several months, in part because I hope to return to my CCCC Chair’s Address, revisit it, and expand it into a book. In the post preceding this one, I provide a reflection on the composing theory course I taught this term. There is something about toolness and the way it connects to writing that needs expl

oration. I saw today, for example, a license place with the inscription “Jesu Est.” The author didn’t write this in the sense of marking a surface, but did write it in the sense of asking for it. Does this count? And what about the ESL student discussed on WPA-L who used an Apple ap to translate his Korean into English for a composition assignment. In short, we haven’t theorized our relationship(s) to the materials and tools of composing, and for a theory of composing, such sub-theorizing is needed.

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