Uptake Resources

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 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.

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.

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.