Uptake Resources

Use the GWRJ Tags to find published pieces about uptake and antecedent knowledge.

This ISU Writing Program brief overview document shares a little bit about how we understand and practice uptake as ongoing, social, multi-purposed, divergent, and multi-genred. We also link you to other resources to check out depending on what you’re interested in, what you need as a writer, or what you’re struggling with as a learner.

In this ISU Writing Program YouTube video, we define uptake as a social activity of learning and figuring things out. We also explain why uptake matters to our learning, our attitudes about writing, and our antecedent writing knowledge and experiences.

This ISU Writing Program article shares our evolving understandings of 6 different kinds of uptake (so far) from our uptake program research project (2020-22) that we see people practicing in order to document writing learning and practices. For each kind of uptake, we give a brief description, a few goals, and lists of questions that writers can ask themselves and others in order to participate in writing uptake.

This ISU Writing Program article defines uptake and focuses on divergent uptake to explain how everyone’s learning is necessarily different from others’. We talk about the relationships between uptake and antecedent knowledge and experience in relation to writing as a research-based activity that is complex and messy.

This ISU Writing Program article defines uptake genres, explains categories of uptake genres, and lists uptake genres that writers often use. We share what uptake genres should allow us to do as writers to document and trace our writing learning and practices over varying periods of time.

In this Bad Ideas about Writing chapter, Allison Carr suggests seeing failure as a way to learn rather than something that happens when we don’t know enough or try hard enough. Carr asserts that failing as writers can happen when we are thinking differently or challenging established ideas and practices.

In this Writing Spaces article, Amy Cicchino discusses how writers can transition from first-year writing courses to writing in specific disciplines. Cicchino provides strategies for adapting writing skills to different academic contexts and how to transfer our writing knowledge to disciplinary genre writing. 

In this article from Bad Ideas about Writing, Joshua Daniel-Wariya explains how gamifying a writing class can contribute not just to fun but to motivation and learning. Daniel-Wariya describes how gaming strategies can increase learners’ enjoyment, improve writers’ productivity, and engage people in interactive play.

In this ISU Writing Program YouTube video, rhetorical genre studies scholar Anis Bawarshi describes the “in between” spaces where uptake takes place. Bawarshi talks about how we transfer knowledge across familiar situations relying on genres and “fast uptakes,” and how different writing situations require slower uptakes from us as writers.