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Deborah Brandt
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Introduction: the rise of mass writing

In meetings of the First Federal Congress in June 1789, as James Madison

experimented with wording that would eventually become the First Amend-
ment, he proposed to include the following:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to
publish their sentiments.

Roger Sherman, representative from Connecticut, concurred in a committee

report filed in the following month, declaring that among the “natural rights” of
the people are “speaking, writing, and publishing their sentiments with decency
and freedom.”
But by the time that the Bill of Rights was enacted, references to the peo-
ple’s right to write and publish had been subsumed into what we know today
as the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, which states simply that:
“Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the freedom of speech, or of the
press.”1
Why the people’s explicit right to write was excised from the language of the
Bill of Rights is lost to history. Perhaps it was merely to repair a redundancy,
as writing is a form of speech. Perhaps it was to more singularly enshrine
the press as “the greatest bulwark of liberty,” to borrow language from yet
another early version of the amendment. Perhaps it was a concession to the fact
that few commoners of that day would have had the literacy skills necessary
to render their political sentiments in publishable form – let alone access to
material means to publish them. Or perhaps it was a point of deliberate semantic
retrenchment, from fear that a popular claim to the full powers of writing might
take this experiment in democracy a step too far. While the founders would
have been ready to foster and protect a nation of readers, it would have been
difficult, for a variety of reasons, to imagine a nation of writers.
But erasing writing from the language of the Bill of Rights may have had
ramifications that are especially felt now as digital technologies finally make
feasible the idea of the writing/publishing citizen. For in the intervening years
the rights of everyday Americans to write and publish became enmeshed in

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2 The rise of mass writing

complicated legal and economic encumbrances that had long been associated
with writing and publishing: systems of patronage, control, regulation, and
surveillance through which written expressions emerge as products of modi-
fied ownership, multiple interests, and distributed responsibility and reward.
Not a week goes by without a headline that brings attention to some of
these complications, whether about the employee fired for the injudicious blog
entry or Facebook’s latest strategy for exploiting those who publish on its
pages.
From the earliest years of the Republic, mass reading – but not mass writing –
was considered indispensable to liberty and to the workings of democracy. Citi-
zens needed unfettered access to the widest array of information in order to vote
intelligently and be critical watchdogs of their government. The quintessential
citizen was the informed citizen, the reading citizen. Where the press and other
expressive dimensions of literacy were protected, it was in order to serve this
reading citizenry (Brown 1997). Over time, deep-seated connections between
literacy and democracy heaped legal protections upon people’s reading free-
doms; justified the spread and continued maintenance of public libraries; led
to massive investments of time and money in reading education; and fed the
anxiety that changes in people’s reading habits or skills were threats to the
health of the democracy.
All the while, mass writing developed through a different cultural heritage.
It became connected not to citizenship but to work, vocation, avocation, and
practical living. The writing skills of everyday people were captured largely for
private enterprise, trade, and artisanship. Writing belonged to the transactional
sphere, the employment and production sphere, where high-vaulted values of
personal autonomy, critical expression, or civic activism rarely found traction
and where, in fact, unauthorized writing could well lead to recrimination,
if not incrimination. Rather than being protected in the Bill of Rights, the
people’s writing came to be regulated by contract, labor law, and copyright,
as writing skills were rented out as part of production and profit-making. It is
not surprising, given this heritage, that the idea of the quintessential citizen as
an informing citizen, as an independent writing citizen, would have a wobblier
presence in the national imaginary. If, as the founders reasoned, the people’s
literacy developed through their reading and the people’s democracy developed
through their reading, then people’s writing and the civic protections around
it mattered less from a political or educational perspective. Reading was the
dominant literate skill, the skill of consequence, and democratic values tacitly
relied on its standing as such. From the founding of the Republic forward, these
assumptions about reading as dominant and writing as recessive conditioned
the ways that mass literacy was supported, experienced, regulated, and valued.
But do these relationships still hold?

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The rise of mass writing 3

The rise of mass writing

When it comes to what is new about literacy these days, digital technology tends
to capture the attention, as it is likened to the printing press (only speedier)
in its radical impact on communications and social organization (Bolter 2001,
Eisenstein 1982). But this attention glosses over what may be a more radical – if
quieter – transformation, namely, the turn to writing as a mass daily experience.
Largely congruent with the rise of digital communication but not synonymous
with it, the rise of mass writing has accompanied the emergence of the so-
called knowledge or information economy, first identified by Fritz Machlup in
1962 (Machlup, 1972) and elaborated by Marc Uri Porat in 1977, an economy
based not in the manufacturing of things but in the manufacturing of services –
knowledge, ideas, data, information, news. In this economy texts serve as a chief
means of production and a chief output of production, and writing becomes
a dominant form of manufacturing. Millions of Americans now engage in
creating, processing, and managing written communications as a major aspect
of their work. It is not unusual for many American adults to spend 50 percent
or more of the workday with their hands on keyboards and their minds on
audiences, spending so much time and energy in acts of writing, in fact, that
their appetites for reading often wane. As the nature of work in the United
States has changed – toward making and managing information and knowledge
in increasingly globalized settings – intense pressure has come to bear on the
productive side of literacy, the writing side (Brandt 2004, Drucker 2003). For
perhaps the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing seems to be
eclipsing reading as the literate experience of consequence. What happens
when writing, not reading, becomes the dominant grounds of daily literate
experience? How does a societal shift in time and energy toward writing affect
the ways that people develop their literacy and understand its worth? How
does the ascendancy of a writing-based literacy create tensions in a society
whose institutions were organized around a reading-based literacy, around a
presumption that readers would be many and writers would be few? Of special
concern is the alienation of mass writing from the civic protections afforded
mass reading. What happens to the associations between literacy and democracy
when writing takes over?
In the fanfare over the digital revolution, the intensifying recruitment of
writing literacy into economic productivity on a mass scale has been largely
overlooked – as has its inevitable spillover into the leisure lives of young people,
who are being invited by commercial interests to invest their scribal skills (as
well as money and time) in online writing activities. Writing – paid and unpaid –
is keeping the economy, especially the Internet economy, afloat. While until
recently it would have been difficult to fathom how people could be writing

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4 The rise of mass writing

more than reading, it is indeed happening for many. This shift represents a new,
uncharted, and unsettling stage in the history of mass literacy, one with serious
social, political, and cultural implications for which we are unprepared.
Mass literacy has almost exclusively been understood and described from
the reading perspective. Now we must take writing seriously, in its own right,
as a set of practices and dispositions that is shaping the experience of mass
literacy and the values associated with it. The Rise of Writing weaves together
historical perspectives on mass writing and mass reading with an analysis of
the experiences of everyday, contemporary literates to understand the dynamic,
human consequences of this major cultural transition. In each chapter and from
different angles, the focus moves backward into the past to attend to writing
as initially a minor strain of mass literacy, one with a distinctively different
and even alienated cultural heritage from mass reading. Then, I explore how
these legacies come forward into contemporary literate experience, as I study
the accounts of ninety people, aged 15 to 80, who use writing regularly in
their vocations and avocations. In in-depth interviews that I conducted between
2005 and 2012, people discussed with me the writing they do, how they learned
it, how it affects them and their families, and how they experience shifting
relationships between reading and writing, whether directly in their own literacy
experiences or in the wider world. Through their experiences we will be able
to see how a growing rivalry between writing and reading sets up potential
contradictions in the meanings and values of literacy upon which our society
has long rested.
In educational circles it is not uncommon to think of reading and writing as
mutually supportive and interrelated processes, drawing on similar underlying
language skills and similar social, pragmatic, and rhetorical knowledge (Tier-
ney and Shanahan 1991). In school especially, reading typically initiates writing
assignments and writing is often used to assess reading. Reading is always part
of a writing process (if only to read over one’s own words) and writing is often
part of a reading process. In many literacy practices, the two are thoroughly
intertwined. But these conjunctions of reading and writing within contemporary
school experience gloss over their different cultural histories or what I would
call their sponsorship histories. Initially mass reading spread under the auspices
of church and State, institutions that sought to universalize reading in order to
integrate initiates into shared belief systems. Reading was for learning how to be
good – in worship, citizenship, work, and school. Books had value because their
goodness was thought to rub off on readers. This moral valence around reading
still holds strong today, as reading to young children is treated as the hallmark of
good parenting and reading is almost always treated as a wholesome alternative
to rival entertainments. Writing has played a role in this moral system when it
has served as part of spiritual practice or a tool for learning or disciplining the
mind (Burton 2008; Foucault 1988; Miller 1998). But writing has always been

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Origins of this study 5

less for good than it is a good. While reading has productive value for a reader,
writing has surplus value that fuels other enterprises. The commercial value
of writing, the way it can be transacted and enhance other transactions, the
way it can fit into systems of work, wage, and market, all make writing unique
among the so-called language arts, giving it a different cultural history from
reading. In the colonial period, writing was taught separately from reading,
often in private pay settings and as part of practical training for the world of
work. It took longer to democratize, and its subversive and deceptive powers
marked it for heightened control (Monaghan 2005). Practically speaking, writ-
ing has flourished not in the civic sphere but in the realm of patronage, where
writers enter into some sort of give-and-take relationship with more powerful
others in exchange for access to tools, audiences, or remunerations of various
kinds. “To be a writer,” David D. Hall (2007) observed of literacy conditions
in the seventeenth century “was to enter into a relationship of dependence”
(p. 76). This statement remains most true today – the only difference being that
many more people are writing now.
For most of the history of mass literacy, the value of writing has resided in the
reading of it, not the doing of it. Authorship gained its prestige from its power to
morally uplift a civic readership. Reading has been seen as the avenue to intel-
lectual and moral improvement. The capacity for ordinary, functional writing to
develop a person’s character, or ensure social well-being, or strengthen demo-
cratic processes has gotten little consideration in our public discourse about
literacy, and paltry protection from our legal institutions. In short, at least until
now, the potentials (and pitfalls) of mass writing as a grounds for democracy
have been stifled within the ideological arrangements of a reading literacy – not
only in the nation’s educational mission but more broadly in the culture. Now,
as writing gains in economic and social power, attraction, and consequence
and as writing takes on a more formative role in literacy development across
the lifespan, reading inevitably grows more subordinate and writing’s alternate
sponsorship history surges into prominence. With it comes potential challenge
to bedrock beliefs, values, and practices associated with a healthy mass literacy.

Origins of this study

In 2001 I published Literacy in American Lives, a book that sought to charac-
terize the changing conditions for literacy learning as they were felt in the lived
experiences of everyday Americans across the twentieth century. The book was
based on eighty in-depth interviews conducted in the mid-1990s with a diverse
group of people born between 1895 and 1985, individuals who were asked
to recount everything they could remember about how they learned to read
and write across their lifetimes. Working closely with their accounts led me
to develop an analytic concept I called sponsors of literacy – constellations of

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agents and entities who develop, exploit, or suppress people’s literacy and gain
economic or political advantage by doing so. As the society grew more reliant
on literacy, sponsors of literacy proliferated, their competing interests palpa-
ble at the recollected scenes of literacy learning. This competition of literacy
sponsors lent to conditions of stratification and change in literacy across the
twentieth century, raising standards for literacy achievement while shaping the
manners in which everyday people pursued their literacy. Sponsors of literacy
leave their mark not only on individual learners but also on whole communities,
regions, economies, and social eras in ways that linger, for better or worse, for
subsequent generations.
Two major discoveries came out of that project (discoveries at least for
me!). One was the curious contrast in the ways that most people cast their
earliest memories of reading versus their earliest memories of writing, more
readily associating reading with leisure, worship, pleasure, intimacy, and social
approval and writing more readily with work, adult business, trouble, embar-
rassment, subterfuge, and trauma. As I came to realize, these modern-day mem-
ories carried echoes of the earliest arrangements of mass literacy, especially
the divergent sponsorship histories of reading and writing and their different
statuses in schooling. The other discovery was the enormous influence of the
workplace as a reported site of significant literacy learning and relearning. Over
the lifespan, literacy change reached people most directly through their jobs,
making once serviceable skills obsolete and new skills compulsory, affect-
ing, in turn, how reading and writing took place at home. On any given day,
workplaces may expend more time, effort, and resources in the teaching and
learning of literacy than schools do, merely as part of routine word production,
putting enormous technological and linguistic know-how into the hands of (at
least some) employees while putting enormous pressure on everybody’s liter-
acy performance. In retrospect, I knew that I had only scratched the surface of
these two phenomena: differences between reading and writing; and the role
of the workplace in catalyzing change in literacy. More research was needed.
Adding to this imperative was the fact that all of my interviewing for Literacy in
American Lives had concluded in 1995, the year, according to most observers,
that the Internet went into mass circulation, affording stupendous changes in
how communication could occur and where and when work was done, as well
as inviting new ways of encountering literacy, including new genres for writing
and reading.
The Rise of Writing was born, then, out of these gaps. I set to work
by studying available cultural histories of mass reading and writing, helped
by the publication of the multi-volume A History of the Book in America
(Hall 2007–2010), a comprehensive project that makes unusual attempts to
attend to the social history of writing where it can, even as those efforts recon-
firm that we know much more about reading and readers than writing and

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Framework 7

writers.2 Paul Starr’s Creation of the Media (2004) was an influential resource,
as it shows how communication systems tend to remain entrenched in the
political arrangements through which they are initially developed and regu-
lated. I also found help in Charles Bazerman’s Handbook on Writing Research
(2007), a multidisciplinary and multi-thematic volume that puts writing at the
center of attention, as well as Nancy Torrance and David Olson’s Cambridge
Handbook of Literacy (2009), another transdisciplinary collection that takes
a broad cultural and historical approach. I also continued reading economic
theory and history, particularly work that focused on the formation of the so-
called information or knowledge society, as well as cultural and legal studies
having to do with literacy and labor. Especially helpful were Alfred Chandler’s
classic The Visible Hand (1977), which showed how symbol-based work grew
out of speed-ups in production and communication; JoAnne Yates’s Control
Through Communication (1993), a work rich with incidental evidence of how
workplaces manufacture new literacy practices; Catherine Fisk’s highly infor-
mative, Working Knowledge (2009), an account of employers’ gradual legal
control over employees’ skills, including their mental and scribal skills; as well
as such work as Alan Burton-Jones’s Knowledge Capitalism (2001) and the
prescient writings of Peter Drucker (2003).
Cumulatively, this background reading provided theoretical and historical
perspectives helpful for the design of another interview-based project, preparing
me to trace the phenomena that interested me most: how divergent sponsorship
histories of reading and writing might continue to manifest and matter in
current literacy experiences and how an intensifying use of writing for work
might affect how people experience and value their literacy. The aim was to
investigate along two main tracks: (1) to explore how writing’s differences from
reading might be pulling mass literacy in new directions; but also (2) to see,
despite differences in circumstances, whether people might consider writing
a site for the same kinds of moral and intellectual growth that is habitually
attributed to reading. What does day-in-day-out writing do for – and to –
the people who carry it out? Reading is associated (some would say overly
associated) with just about every positive human quality imaginable, from
empathy to critical thinking to civic engagement. How does writing stand in
relationship? These two lines of investigation – one focused on differences and
one on similarities – were meant to attend to what Harvey Graff (1987) has
called contradictions and continuities in the history of mass literacy, as they are
being carried forward through the rise of writing over reading.

Framework
The Rise of Writing borrows most directly from the methodological perspective
of French sociologist Daniel Bertaux (1981), who uses interviews and other

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8 The rise of mass writing

biographical material to understand how sociopolitical developments register

in felt experience – how people move through history and how history moves
through them. Sometimes called a “realist” approach to narrative inquiry, with
antecedents in the work of Oscar Lewis, C. Wright Mills and others in the
Chicago School, Bertaux’s biographical sociology uses systematic comparisons
of biographical materials to uncover the structuring forces behind a given social
phenomenon (in his case, intergenerational social mobility). The method is not
designed to explicate individual lives or individual intentions or to celebrate
individual heroics. It is “to make explicit the traces of social phenomena and
processes that are showing – to the informed eye – on the surface of somebody’s
life, [as] experiences narrated to the interviewer” (Bertaux 2003, p. 40). Like
oral history, biographical sociology often explores the lives of the overlooked,
everyday people whose voices are usually absent from official representations.
The aim is to gather facts about their lives, in the words of Bertaux, to learn:
“what people have done, where and when, with whom, in which local contexts,
with what results” as well as “what has been done to people and how they
reacted to it” [author’s italics] (Bertaux 2003, p 39). Uncovering systematic
patterns across these facts reveals the structuring forces, or what Bertaux calls
the social logics, up against which people live their lives (Bertaux and Delacroix
2000).
As in Bertaux’s work, The Rise of Writing treats research participants not so
much as objects of study but as witnesses to socio-historical change. Individuals
and their stories are not my focus per se. Rather, what matters is what can be
systematically and objectively gleaned from them about how the history of
mass literacy – past, present, and future – manifests in particular times, places,
and social locations; how particular members of society enter into its force; and
with what effects on them and others. While people’s accounts provide a finite
universe of available facts for study, those facts must be queried and interpreted
to yield understanding. The subjective viewpoints of research participants are an
essential ingredient – but not where the interpretation begins or where it ends.
What matters is how and when people appeal in their accounts to historical
and social formations of mass literacy, as resources, constraints, explanations,
puzzles, and problems of their existence. The more these appeals turn up across
contexts, the closer I come to what I pursue.
This realist perspective has been subject to criticism, above all, for its lack
of attention to the interview event itself as a powerful structuring agent –
considering, for instance, how a researcher uses questions to structure attention
or how both interviewer and interviewee use available discourse to structure
their sense of history, meaning, or identity and do so on the spot, as a produc-
tion of the interaction itself. Another limitation of this perspective, according
to critics, is how it takes what people say at face value, without concern about
memory failure, unconscious drives, or the influence of power dynamics or

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Project design 9

anxiety as elements of questions and answers.3 These criticisms are serious

and legitimate. Yet it is a fundamental assumption of this study that the field of
literacy studies, in both its research and pedagogical dimensions, could better
appreciate – from a sociological perspective – how an accumulating history
of mass literacy and its transformations manifest as individual literate expe-
rience; how anyone’s literacy development is inside that contingent historical
development, not in a fated, deterministic way but in a practical way that mat-
ters and can be analyzed. The macro-force of literacy is an ongoing cultural
production that exceeds any single verbal version of it, making itself present
in stories about reading and writing. Understanding this historical contingency
is important for understanding aspirations, problems, and practices around lit-
eracy, whether they show up as educational policy, in a legal ruling, or at the
scene of an individual’s learning.

Project design
In 2005 I began to interview people who held positions that required them to
write on average for at least 15 percent of the workday. Given constraints of
time and resources, I sought participants whom I could meet face-to-face in
the general region where I also lived and worked, a Midwestern, mid-sized
city that is home to a large public university and state government with an
additional economic base principally in health care, insurance, biotechnology,
light industry, and retail. Using information from the US Census Community
Survey, I identified economic sectors that employed large numbers of people as
well as occupations that depended on writing, and I began what amounted to a
process of cold calling to recruit participants to the study. I emailed individuals
directly when their addresses (and often brief bios) appeared on company
or agency websites, or I called business owners or personnel or information
officers in business and government for leads. Sometimes colleagues or friends
provided contacts after learning about the study, and in a few cases those I
interviewed encouraged me to talk with co-workers, which I did. I sought
avenues and contact strategies that I hoped would lead to an inclusive pool of
participants in terms of gender, age, race, and ethnicity, as well as occupation
and size of organization. As the questions of the study clarified themselves, I
crafted the participant pool into thirty people working in the private sector and
thirty people working in the public sector.
Interviewing continued over a period of seven years, as I could find the
time and willing participants. About half the people I contacted declined to
participate or declined permission to allow me access to their employees. One
CEO explained that her employees did not have time to talk with me. Other
people simply did not respond or declined without explanation. As with other

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projects of this kind, my ideal aim of developing a census-based sample of the

workaday writing population gave way to exigency as I began to take any inter-
view I could get, resulting in overrepresentation of some populations and occu-
pations and underrepresentation of many populations and occupations.4 Miss-
ing from this study, by design, are people whose jobs require little or no writing.
Heavily represented are people who do a lot of writing and thereby participants
who have higher levels of education and higher-paying jobs than the popula-
tion overall. Characteristics of the sixty participants appear in Appendix 1.
Additional information about particular participants appears in individual
chapters.
Interviews took place at times and places chosen by the interviewees, some-
times at work, sometimes in public places like restaurants and coffee shops,
and occasionally in their homes. Interviews lasted about one hour, sometimes
two, and were semi-structured, focusing on straightforward questions about the
writing people do at work, how they learned to do it, and how it relates to other
aspects of their literacy experiences. Reading–writing relationships also were
probed. Of course, many unanticipated topics emerged in the conversation,
leading to gradual adjustments in subsequent interviews. The basic interview
script appears in Appendix 2. I audiotaped all interviews and transcribed them
myself for analysis.5 Using principles of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), I
coded each interview for evidence of sponsorship histories, differences between
reading and writing, and effects of writing on self and others, coding and recod-
ing over a number of years as patterns evolved into consolidated concepts.
Additional information about coding appears in individual chapters.
In 2011 I added a third population to the study: thirty young adults aged 15
to 25 who pursue writing as an avocation. Specifically I sought participants
who wrote on a regular basis outside of school for creative or political/civic
expression or else as journalists, freelance writers, or entrepreneurs. This sub-
study allowed me to examine current elective writing and publishing practices
and to include a younger population not present in the larger study.6 I found
participants locally by contacting guidance counselors, teachers, coordinators
of pre-college programs, people who worked with community youth, and other
personal and professional connections. I also searched websites and campus
and community publications to locate writers to contact. In all cases I used
recruitment strategies that would favor inclusion in terms of gender, race and
ethnicity, and socioeconomic background. Parental permissions were obtained
for minor participants. Agreement to participate was higher in this study than
the employee study, perhaps because I relied more on intermediaries; five indi-
viduals declined requests to be interviewed. Characteristics of participants in
this sub-study appear in Appendix 3 and additional information about par-
ticular participants appears in Chapter 3. Interviews were held at mutually
arranged times and places, during lunch hours or after school at high schools,

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