Editors’ Note

Abstract

As readers may have noted, the apostrophe in “Editor’s Note” has again shifted rightward. Although it has been 20 years since the journal was officially coedited, a coeditorship was, of course, where it began when Stephen Witte and John Daly launched Written Communication: An International Quarterly of Research, Theory, and Application in 1984. Witte and Daly (1984) opened the first issue of Written Communication by describing their “lofty ambition” to create “a major and respected outlet for original scholarship on writing,” one that would address “substantive issues on writing from the perspectives of such fields as rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, English, journalism, reading, communication, document design, anthropology, semiotics, and education” (pp. 3-4). This ambition was lofty not because high-quality, interesting research on writing across these disciplines was in short supply, but because it was debatable whether one journal could really foster the “climate,” as they called it, where such perspectives could comfortably coexist. From the perspective of 2023, the debate about whether one journal can support a broad writing studies research community is firmly settled. Written Communication can unapologetically describe itself as the “essential journal for research on the study of writing in all its symbolic forms” (Sage, 2023, Written Communication Journal Description). Any given issue of Written Communication, after all, might feature six different inquiries into writing without a single shared citation. It took a lot of work to create a climate where that kind of methodological and theoretical diversity could flourish, and climates, as we know to our sorrow, cannot be taken for granted. Although Daly stepped down in 1989, Witte would continue editing for another 15 years, including some exceptionally productive coeditorships with Deborah Brandt, Marty Nystrand, Roger Cherry, and Keith Walters. Editors’ letters were infrequent during this period, so we do not have much explicit guidance on climate-building, apart from Witte’s insistence on the need to suspend prejudgment on what constitutes a “worthy topic” for research on writing. His letter for the 15th-anniversary issue is typical: