Viele Grüße,
Dagmar Knorr

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The Mouton de Gruyter Handbooks of Applied Linguistics series | Volume 10
Handbook of Writing and Text Production (2013, in preparation)
Eva-Maria Jakobs & Daniel Perrin

The shift from an industrial to an information society has increased the importance of writing and text production in education, in everyday life and in more and more professions in the fields of economics and politics, science and technology, culture and media. Through writing, we build up social networks, develop projects, inform colleagues and customers, and generate the basis for decisions. We send e-mail messages with text attachments, publish those texts, and store them in knowledge databases. The quality of the products of all these processes is often decisive for social resonance and professional success.

Nevertheless, many people experience writing and text production as a painful duty or a tedious routine. Beginners as well as experienced writing professionals have to fight to find the right words and sentences, the most convincing form and content, and they complain of writing problems or even blocks. Obviously text production places demands on semiotic, linguistic and intellectual capacities in quite different ways from speaking, which usually seems much more manageable. This gap between the importance of writing and people’s competence raises the questions of how text production can be conceptualized, taught and learned and, above all, what writing and text production are  in terms of human activities.

The Handbook of Writing and Text Production provides a state-of-the-art description of writing and text production, their theoretical and empirical investigation, and their relevance as real world problems in which language and communication are central issues. The volume contains seven sections focussing on the theory and methodology of writing and text production research as well as on problem-oriented and problem-solving approaches related to author, mode, genre, media, and domain. Every section has its own sub-editors, and the chapters are co-authored by two internationally-recognized scholars, each from different geographic areas and academic traditions (e.g. US-Asia, Australia-Africa, or Europe-Latin America). This authorship policy ensures comparative and comprehensive coverage of research into writing and text production.