Nystrand’s research on the history of writing as an activity and Composition and Rhetoric as an academic area of research has correlated its origins and development amidst increases in social mobility and consequential demographic shifts.Nystrand, M. (2008). The social and historical context for writing research. In C. MacArthur (Ed.), Handbook of Writing Research, pp. 11-27. New York: The Guilford Press. Indeed, as Schmandt-Besserat shows,Schmandt-Besserat, D. 1977(June). The Earliest Precursor of Writing. "Scientific American, 238"(6), pp. 50-58 this seems to have been the case as long ago ancient Mesopotamia when in the late fourth millennium BCE, the cuneiform script was invented in the Near East to accommodate a new expanding and expansive commercial class of trading. Later in mid- to late-eighteenth century Britain, as Miller shows,Miller, T. (1997). "The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces", University of Pittsburgh Press composition and rhetoric first gained traction in provincial colleges, not elite universities like Cambridge and Oxford (where Latin was the principal medium of instruction). During this period, an expanding middle class sought self-improvement through writing instruction, as well as upscaling their working class dialects through enunciation instruction. Dissenters to the Catholic throne and drivers of the Protestant Reformation such as Adam Smith and Joseph Priestley, who were prohibited from teaching at Cambridge and Oxford, took to teaching writing, in English, not Latin. Grammars and dictionaries flourished.
