Language and Dialogue - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2016

This article, introducing the special issue, aims at sketching the emerging field of studies on writing-in-interaction within an ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analytic (CA) perspective. It does so by situating research carried out in this perspective within the existing literature and by offering some larger input on how the field could be developed. Writing-in-interaction is here approached by considering writing in social interaction as a multimodal phenomenon, with a special emphasis on handwriting. The paper presents current studies and further possible developments of writing in interaction, including the detailed analysis of video fragments. It shows how it is possible to finely analyze the moment-by-moment organization of writing as a multimodal social practice, demonstrating its embodied projectability, its material and multimodal graphic achievement, and its embeddedness in sequential organization and in multiactivity.

In social work practice, keeping records of encounters with clients is a routinized practice for documenting cases. This paper focuses on the specific task of obtaining the prospective clients’ correct address for filling in a standardized personal report form. My analysis focuses in the way both the client(s) and the social worker cooperatively orient to the practice of writing addresses, showing how this apparently simple task is multimodally implemented within interaction, and how it can generate some complications and expansions. A special focus will be devoted to difficulties encountered by clients to give their address in an adequate way, as well as to the transformation of this activity from an individual to a collective task.

The paper studies the activity of note-taking in interactions between a university student counselor and an undergraduate student. The study is based on authentic videotaped discussions recorded in a Finnish university. The study concentrates on sequences consisting of a question, an answer, and the taking of notes. The aim of the paper is to present a detailed multimodal analysis on how the note-taker moves from not writing to writing and how nodding is used in both receiving the answer and indicating the transition from listening to taking down notes. Listening and note-taking are seen as a dual involvement depending partially on the same embodied resources, especially the gaze and bodily orientation. The shift from listening to note-taking often is indicated with a pronounced writing initial nod.

In this article, we set out to examine how participants organize their note-taking while engaged in multiparty interaction. We first describe the collective display of affiliation as an interactional practice that allows note-takers to identify recordables and to legitimize their writing. We then focus on the use of examples (e.g.) and parentheses in the written notes. While style guides recommend the use of examples and parentheses to indicate subsidiary information, we describe the interactional history that leads to such scriptorial practices in collaborative writing. The analyses show that both examples and parentheses may originate from various interactional practices (e.g. listing, instruction, epistemic disputes) and that they may relate to highly salient topics of the interaction. We use the methods developed in conversation analysis, which we extend to the analysis of multimodal phenomena of interaction.

This paper offers a multimodal approach of writing as an embodied interactional action, prefigured by the movements of the entire body, projecting going to write. It considers grassroots participatory democracy meetings as an exemplary setting for studying issues related to writing in public, for the public and on behalf of the public. In this context, a facilitator is in charge of writing down the outcome of the participatory discussion, in a way that is public, transparent and intelligible for the audience. On the basis of extensive video recordings, I study the methodic embodied practices that precede and lead to public writing. The analysis shows that the writing of proposals is contingent on the establishment of an agreement about them: clear agreement is followed by a straight and brisk walk of the facilitator towards the board, projecting the inscription. By contrast, when there are problems in establishing the agreement, his walk is more discontinuous. Finally, in case of persisting disagreement, the walk deploys in very different manners. Thus embodied movements of the facilitator are reflexively related to the agreed upon vs. disagreed status of the proposal that the facilitator is going to inscribe. This demonstrates how writing is strongly projected by walking; and how writing is observably done in a public, transparent, and revisable way as the product of a collective action.

Prior conversation analytic studies have shown that writing is a multifaceted activity, one that is accomplished in different participation configurations and through different practices of text production. A key factor that organises writing is whether participants jointly produce one text or write their own texts individually. While this choice is sometimes institutionally regulated (e.g. when counsellors take notes only for themselves), in some settings participants can manage the ‘jointness’ of writing. This article explores such management by examining how students seek and gain access to another student’s writing during individual writing tasks. The multimodal analysis focuses on sequences where students consult or share task answer formulations with each other, showing some routine ways — verbal and embodied — of negotiating such access. The focal sequences are a site of moral negotiation about where the borderline between individual and social lies, which manifests itself through different ways of seeking and granting (or blocking) access.