Charles Bazerman is an American rhetoric and writing scholar at UC Santa Barbara whose work on genre theory and writing as social action shaped how the field understands the relationship between texts and the systems they operate in.
Core ideas
- Writing as literate action: Bazerman extended Carolyn Miller’s genre theory by integrating it with activity theory. Writing isn’t just a text — it’s an action within an activity system, and understanding writing means understanding the system it operates in [@bazerman2015].
- Genre systems: beyond individual genres, Bazerman analyzed how genres interact in systems — one genre (a proposal) triggers another (a grant decision), which triggers another (a progress report). Understanding these systems reveals how writing organizes institutional work.
- Writing across the curriculum: Bazerman’s research showed that writing in different disciplines isn’t just stylistically different — it enacts different epistemologies. How a physicist writes up results and how a historian writes up findings reflect different ideas about what counts as knowledge.
Notable works
- A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action Volume 1 (2013)
- Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (1988)
- The Languages of Edison’s Light (1999)
Related
- Carolyn Miller — genre theory that Bazerman extended
- genre — the concept Bazerman’s work develops through activity theory
- technical writing — Bazerman’s work explains how technical genres function within institutions