Lifespan Development of Writing

The Lifespan Development of Writing presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development at different ages from multiple, cross-disciplinary perspectives, including psychological, linguistic, sociocultural, and curricular.

Although writing begins early in life and can develop well into adulthood, we know too little about how writing develops before, during, and after schooling, as well as too little about how an individual's writing experiences relate to one another developmentally across the lifespan. There is currently no adequate accepted theory of writing development that can inform the design of school curricula and motivate appropriate assessment practices across the years of formal education.

The Lifespan Development of Writing is a first step toward understanding how people develop as writers over their lifetimes and presents the results of a four-year project to synthesize the research on writing development. First collectively offering the joint statement “Toward an Understanding of Writing Development across the Lifespan," the authors then focus individually on specific periods of writing development, including early childhood, adolescence, and working adulthood, looked at from different angles.

They conclude with a summative understanding of trajectories of writing development and implications for further research, teaching, and policy, including the assertion that writing research “can raise our curricular vision beyond the easily measurable to recognize that writing development is far more than the accretion of easy testable skills, and that successful writing development cannot be defined as movement toward a standard."

Charles Bazerman has always been interested in the practice and teaching of writing, understood in a socio-historic context. Using socially based theories of genre, activity system, interaction, intertextuality, and cognitive development, he investigates the history of scientific writing, other forms of writing used in advancing technological projects, and the relation of writing to the development of disciplines of knowledge. 

He hopes to contribute to our understanding of the importance of writing in all domains of modern life, and to contribute to the teaching and learning of writing at all levels of schooling, as writing is a major medium of participating in society and developing one's life with the contemporary complex literate world. He has contributed to a number of other editorial projects (such as the Handbook of Research on Writing and the series of Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition) and organizational initiatives (founder of the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research and its Writing Research Across the Borders Conference; founder of the Research Network Forum; organizer of the ILEES project).

More than a distinguished scholar, Professor Arthur Applebee, who taught at UAlbany from 1987 to 2015, was deeply committed to the success of his students and to the entire School of Education. He shared his life’s work with his wife and research partner, Dr. Judith Langer. The pair co-directed the National Research Center on Literature Teaching and Learning.