OED (2022)

That which is contained in anything.

We usually think about content as information (facts and concepts), usually important information related to school or some discipline like . . . English or physics or what have you. The root definition of the word—”the things that are held or included in something—invite us to hold this definition. There will be facts and concepts to learn in this class. I want us to think about content in terms of social practices in which “‘content’ is generated, debated, and transformed via distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading” (Gee, 2007, p. 22). Let’s not think of content as rocks laying around that good students pick up and carry with them in their heads. Instead, let’s see content as facts, concepts, identities, and other tools that some group of folks uses in some context to do what they do. In turn, we will try to learn content by watching folks at work in their domain and sometimes by joining in.

School, of course, tends to turn content into rocks that students have to carry around with them in their heads. Students often have to get content in their heads without much sense for what real people use the content for. There is pretty good evidence that this is a recipe for frustration and forgetting. I suspect that while many students are taught physics in school, they mostly learn how to pass physics tests as students in some context. Only a few students use the concepts, identities, and other tools that physicists use to do physics. My goal is to link our course content to the work of producing texts and to avoid asking you to learn to be a writing student rather than a writer of some sort.

Resources

HtWA. Several chapters are relevant

• “Chapter 5: Gathering Materials”
• “Chapter 27: Shaping a Thesis”
• “Chapter 28: Strategies of Development”

Each of the chapters on “Academic Genres” includes a section on “gathering materials.” Lots to go on.

OWL. The section on invention is useful. Lots of ideas for generating content related to an assignment.