An essential reference for students and scholars exploring the methods and methodologies of writing research.

What does it mean to research writing today? What are the practical and theoretical issues researchers face when approaching writing as they do? What are the gains or limitations of applying particular methods, and what might researchers be overlooking? These questions and more are answered by the writing research field’s leading scholars in Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies.

Editors Nickoson and Sheridan gather twenty chapters from leaders in writing research, spanning topics from ethical considerations for researchers, quantitative methods, and activity analysis to interviewing and communitybased and Internet research. While each chapter addresses a different subject, the volume as a whole covers the range of methodologies, technologies, and approaches—both old and new—that writing researchers use, and examines the ways in which contemporary writing research is understood, practiced, and represented.

An essential reference for experienced researchers and an invaluable tool to help novices understand research methods and methodologies, Writing Studies Research in Practice includes established methods and knowledge while addressing the contemporary issues, interests, and concerns faced by writing researchers today.

Lee Nickoson is an assistant professor of Rhetoric & Writing at Bowling Green State University. A co-editor of Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, she has published on writing assessment and multi-modal teaching and research.

“Nickoson and Sheridan’s Writing Studies Research in Practice is a brilliant collection of original essays that together chart a promising future for inquiry in our field, all while paying critical attention to the consequences of inquiries past. In short order, Writing Studies Research in Practice will become required reading across the field—and will remain so for years to come.”—Peter Mortensen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“You will keep this book on your shelf of essential resources, a must-read to share and discuss and to return to again and again. When colleagues or students ask questions about their research projects, this is one book to reach for and say, ‘Here, I’ll mark the chapters you definitely need to read.’”—Lee Ann Carroll, professor emeritus, Pepperdine University