There's something about writing.
I get asked a lot about what exactly it is I do. Often times people don't quite know what "composition" really is beyond handing out worksheets filled with "drills 'n skills" to students. While a lot of fields in academia are poorly understood by those outside of the fields, composition seems to be towards the top were we to rank "the most misunderstood fields" today. But that's OK. Part of what we are as a field is an attempt to investigate these misunderstandings and to untangle where they may have come from.
But every now and then, I get asked why I do what I do. The first question of what it is I do is hard to answer, but answering why I do what I do is actually really easy.
For many people, "writing" is something they usually take for granted. The simplistic understanding of writing is that it is a set of skills and techniques one masters and then employs. Sadly, even for many people who earn a living "teaching writing," this is as far as their understanding of writing goes. To people like this, the "key figures" in the field of composition are the authors of textbooks, handbooks, and style guides. People like James McCrimmon, Diana Hacker, and countless publishing houses that peddle exorbitantly expensive writing manuals to hapless freshman (e.g., the Longman's Writers Companion, The Bedford Writers Handbook, etc).
For me, one of the key documents in my work is Michel Foucault's "What is an author?" This essay describes the field of inquiry in composition studies as I understand it. That is, what is important are questions concerning the role and function of writing, authorship, creativity, and so forth within culture, not prior or external to it.
Ultimately, the most important thing about using Foucault's essay as the starting point in any composition setting is that it forces us to understand not only the rules of writing as being a product of culture, but writing itself to be a wholly cultural phenomena. Using this as the basis for any work in the field (be it in a classroom or through research), what we're talking about when we talk about writing is ourselves, not some eternal, external set of rules that exist prior to culture. When we talk about communication what we're talking about are the ways in which we extend our biological boundaries to include others in our environment. Or, to put it bluntly, anytime we talk about how we communicate, what we're really talking about is how we negotiate the ways we live together within a society; or, in other words, Dewey's definition of "culture." In essence, to talk of communication or writing is simply to talk about who we are as a culture and how our culture works. Thus, writing IS culture.
Writing, as a form of communication, is distinct and unique from other forms in that it exists within a temporal realm. Unlike vocal speech, writing persists through time. It is because of this that when we talk about writing in specific, not only are we talking about the ways we currently live together, but we are also in a position to talk about ways we want to live together. Learning to write is consequently learning to take the stuffs of the environment we find ourselves in and using those things to create something new. Writing is democracy as Whitman understood it. Writing is art as Dewey understood it.
So, to answer the question of why I do what I do is rather simple. In my understanding of the task, the teaching of writing is ultimately engaging in an act and a process that is directly related to purposefully seeking out new and better ways to live both individually and as a society. I joke that I would rename the department of "writing studies" to "the department of democracy and hope." Cheesy, but not that far off the mark from how I understand what it is we should do as teachers of writing.