metaphors and writing

Writing studies is replete with metaphors.

Nedra Reynolds (1998) traced rhetoric and composition’s “imagined geographies,” such as the “field” (Lauer, 1984), the “frontier” (Shaughnessy, 1979), the “margin” (Anzaldúa, 1987; Hill, 1990; Rose, 1989), the “city” (Soja, 1989), and “cyberspace” (Doheny-Farina, 1996). We re/imagine our students as “travelers” (Drew, 2001; Harper, 2004), “citizens” (Berlin, 1996), “workers” (Ohmann, 1985), “cartographers” (Rutz, 2004), “consumers” (Combe, 1998). We cast ourselves as “kitchen cooks, plate twirlers, & troubadours” (George, 1999), bankers (Berlin, 1996), “sad women in the basement” (Miller, 1991), and more. The writing classroom is a “chapel” (Batson, 1993), a “forum” (Bizzell, 1991), “a contact zone” (Pratt, 1991), a “text” (Hawlitschka, 2004), “the agora” (Norgaard, 2004), or it stands in for workplaces in the “the real world” (Hawlitschka, 2004).