If the information is already there, or already somewhere in a spreadsheet, this whole thing might be more viable over time.

Until I have a few mins to rethink all of this, I won’t be posting anything else here.

This update of the 1984 original contains summaries of 19 articles pertaining to “The Process Movement,” starting with Emig and ending with McComiskey in 2000.

Gray-Rosendale takes Flower’s protocol analysis to the next level, incorporating the talking about texts aspect of it into basic writers’ process. She studies and talks extensively about the gains made by basic writers as the result of peer group interactions, coming to the conclusion that basic writers’ texts could only really be understood if seen as a heteroglossia by means of their actual texts and their talk about them.

“More specifically, the oral exchange actually serves as a site of writing improvement for Basic Writers. These Basic Writers’ peer drafting processes produced interactive oral texts that shaped their written documents in a wide variety of ways: as answers of calls to account about one’s own paper, as answers of calls to account one has made concerning another person’s paper, or as answers to calls to account to which one has simply been a witness within the peer group. These impacted both the structure and content of the subsequent drafts.

“As we witnessed, often an accounting sequence that was part of the peers’ conversations then became an integral part of students’ own implicit or explicit arguments within their drafts. Perhaps, Basic Writers’ drafts, at various stages, cannot be apprehended fully unless critical attention is paid to both the structure and content of the oral interactions, which often prompt such changes within students’ drafts. Likewise, it would seem that oral conversations cannot be apprehended fully unless they are examined alongside students’ drafts. Continual study of the interrelationship between students’ conversational choices and their written choices could prove to be beneficial” (150).

She questions whether a text or author can have one uncomplicated purpose, but continually returns to literary examples as the straw man of why we must read different in rhetoric.

“However, even though some ways of talking about a writer’s purpose are reductive and all ways are necessarily partial, we can’t afford to avoid the subject. We need an interactive picture of writing as a purposeful act” (530).

“Our discussion of rhetorical purpose might also include a more text-based analysis such as Kenneth Burke’s description of form as the ‘arousing and fulfillment of desires’ (Counter-Statement)” (530).

Flower points to how some conventions are so conventionalized (like beginnings and endings) that “writers may not realize they have made a ‘choice’” (530).

All glimpses are partial.

“If we are to avoid reducing purpose to the tracks it leaves in text, we need a complementary cognitive view of reading and writing as rhetorical acts. We need a more integrated theory” (531).

“Even though goals and content are naturally linked, a writer’s network of purposes can not be simply equated with (or recovered from) the text. The web may contain many private intentions to which the reader is never privy, even though they quietly govern the text” (531).

“Like other mental representations, this web of purpose may contain a great deal of non-logical, unarticulated, associatively linked information. It likely contains tacit knowledge existing below our threshold of conscious awareness and generates thinking processes which have become so automated they require little attention. For instance, the schema for narratives, which most of us have begun to master by age three, specifies a set of highly conventional goals. Having acquired the schema, we can carry out the plan of telling a story almost automatically-there is little need for conscious attention or active planning. However, when our goals become complex (e.g., we want the story subtly to support a point), we may rise to awareness, reflect on our knowledge, and make our purpose and the goals of narrative the subject of active problem solving” (532).

Flower points to her earlier work in which she establishes a “constructive planning process” as a way to uncover the web of intentions, motives, and purposes (534).

“Three key features of the constructive planning process help explain how purpose is ‘constructed’ over the course of writing and how it can lead both to coherent and to wildly fragmented writing plans.

Planning is a continuing, unpredictable, and often opportunistic process. … [Claims that the network of planning goals is hierarchical.]

The workaday significance of this network lies in its structure and power to guide composing. …

Although this web of purpose (and the goal network we observe) may remain under construction throughout composing, it helps guide the construction of the text. (534)

She implies/assumes that protocol analysis gives us access into the “web of purpose.”

She transcribes a protocol analysis on the next page of a grad students thinking her way through a writing assignment. But to me, what the grad student is lacking is a real sense of audience for the piece. She seems to have been left without any sort of suggested purpose at all, and she is struggling mightily. As an experienced writer, she hones in on the idea that maybe she will write something that she could use with her students. By establishing this as one of her purposes, it becomes pretty clear that her assignment did not include an audience component, and as an experienced writer, she realized that she couldn’t establish a purpose without an audience.¹

Speaking to reading goals:

“Literary theorists have long explored the ways aesthetic goals influence (or should influence) interpretation. Recent psychological research on how purpose shapes comprehension offers additional insights. Readers bring a variety of goals to expository texts, including the goals of reading “to do” something, such as use one’s new computer, versus reading “to learn” something, such as the theory of natural selection. We know that changing these goals can affect the reading strategies people use, the information they recall, and many features of prose processing in general. It can change the depth of processing (e.g., do you skim for key phrases or read and rehearse the argument to yourself?), the amount of mental elaboration done on the text, and the way information is clustered and recalled. (For a review of this work see Bransford; Frase.)” (537).

“For instance, when two groups of adults were asked to read and recall a house description, their recall was significantly influenced by whether they were reading as potential house buyers or prospective burglars-one group remembered the color TV, the other a leak in the roof (Pichert and Anderson). It is perhaps not surprising that we structure information around our own purposes in reading and that we recall the ‘text’ we ourselves construct” (537-38).

“In many ways Asch’s work complements observations of I. A. Richards and later work in literary and rhetorical theory and offers empirical support for at least some of the claims made by writers such as Louise Phelps, David Bartholomae, Patricia Bizzell, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, and Siegfried Schmidt, who argue for various constructive processes in reading. The meaning of a text is not an immutable feature residing in splendid isolation in the text itself” (538).

Flower reviews reading protocol analysis studies as well as those of her own students.

She divides “the rhetorical reading responses of these readers into three categories: inferences about the rhetorical plan of the text, single inferences about specific authorial intentions, and complex rhetorical scenarios which involve a number of linked inferences” (542).

* Note: She attributes to Cleanth Brooks the idea of “intentional fallacy.”

1. So what if she’d been given a “better” writing assignment in the first place? I mean, doesn’t this just speak to the kinds of assignments that we as writing teachers balk against when they are given by teachers in (she says hopefully) other disciplines? Couldn’t this part of the equation have been better addressed by a better writing prompt?

Reprinted in Graves and in Perl.

Faigley points to the process movement as establishing the validity of writing studies.

“For the last few years, Richard Young’s and Maxine Hairston’s accounts of the process movement as a Kuhnian paradigm shift have served as justifications for disciplinary status. Even though the claim of a paradigm shift is now viewed by some as an overstatement, it is evident that many writing teachers in grade schools, high schools, and colleges have internalized process assumptions” (527).

Faigley points to at least three theories of the composing process: expressive (William Coles, Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Stewart); cognitive (Linda Flower, Barry Kroll, and Andrea Lunsford); and social (Patricia Bizzell, Kenneth Bruffee, Marilyn Cooper, Shirley Brice Heath, James Reither, “and authors of several essays collected in Writing in Non-academic Settings edited by Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami”)

He re-connects much older studies of writing to composition as a discipline.

“One of these experiments was D. Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke’s study of the effects of “pre-writing” on writing performance, first published in 1964. Rohman and Wlecke maintained that thinking was different from writing and antecedent to writing; therefore, teachers should stimulate students’ thinking by having them write journals, construct analogies, and, in the spirit of the sixties, meditate before writing essays” (529).

He places most process theorists of his time into one of the three camps; his distinctions seem simplified, but they do establish major tracings from the influences of those theorists (i.e., Kroll and Lunsford from Piaget, Emig from social science).

Faigley points out that the earliest cognitive processing theory was based on cybernetics, and that “The box labelled Writing Processes is analogous to the central processing unit of a computer” (533-34).

“The second source of cognitive theory came from American cognitive psychology, which has spawned several strands of research on composing. Many college writing teachers were introduced to a cognitive theory of composing through the work of Linda Flower and John R. Hayes. Flower and Hayes’ main claims-that composing processes intermingle, that goals direct composing, and that experts compose differently from inexperienced writers-all have become commonplaces of the process movement. Less well understood by writing teachers, however, are the assumptions underlying Flower and Hayes’ model, assumptions derived from a cognitive research tradition. Flower and Hayes acknowledge their debt to this tradition, especially to Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon’s Human Problem Solving, a classic work that helped define the aims and agenda for a cognitive science research program. Newell and Simon theorize that the key to understanding how people solve problems is in their ‘programmability’; in other words, how people use ‘a very simple information processing system’ to account for their ‘problem solving in such tasks as chess, logic, and cryptarithmetic’ (870). The idea that thinking and language can be represented by computers underlies much research in cognitive science in several camps, including artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive psychology. Newell and Simon’s historical overview of this movement credits Norbert Wiener’s theory of cybernetics as the beginnings of contemporary cognitive science. The basic principle of cybernetics is the feedback loop, in which the regulating mechanism receives information from the thing regulated and makes adjustments” (533).

“Thus taking a social view requires a great deal more than simply paying more attention to the context surrounding a discourse. It rejects the assumption that writing is the act of a private consciousness and that everything else-readers, subjects, and texts-is “out there” in the world. The focus of a social view of writing, therefore, is not on how the social situation influences the individual, but on how the individual is a constituent of a culture” (535).

He identifies “four lines of research that take a social view of writing”: poststructuralist theories of language, the sociology of science, ethnography, and Marxism.

He seems to be extending Cooper’s “ecology” proposal:

“The preoccupation with an underlying theory of the writing process has led us to neglect finding answers to the most obvious questions in college writing instruction today: why college writing courses are prevalent in the United States and rare in the rest of the world; why the emphasis on teaching writing occurring in the aftermath of the “literacy crisis” of the seventies has not abated; why the majority of college writing courses are taught by graduate students and other persons in nontenurable positions. Answers to such questions will come only when we look beyond who is writing to whom to the texts and social systems that stand in relation to that act of writing. If the teaching of writing is to reach disciplinary status, it will be achieved through recognition that writing processes are, as Stanley Fish says of linguistic knowledge, “contextual rather than abstract, local rather than general, dynamic rather than invariant” (438).¹

1. Fish, Stanley. “Consequences.” Critical Inquiry 11(1985): 433-58.

Reprinted in Cooper and Holzman (Cooper, Marilyn, and Michael Holzman. eds. Writing as Social Action. Portsmouth, NJ: Boynton/Cook. 1989).

Cooper questions the cognitive model of the writing process.

“The ideal writer the cognitive process model projects is isolated from the social world, a writer I will call the solitary author. The solitary author works alone, within the privacy of his own mind. He uses free writing exercises and heuristics to find out what he knows about a subject and to find something he wants to say to others; he uses his analytic skills to discover a purpose, to imagine an audience, to decide on strategies, to organize content; and he simulates how his text will be read by reading it over himself, making the final revisions necessary to assure its success when he abandons it to the world of which he is not a part. The isolation of the solitary author from the social world leads him to see ideas and goals as originating primarily within himself and directed at an unknown and largely hostile other” (365-66).

“All four of the major pedagogical theories James Berlin describes assume that the function of writing is solely cognitive, a matter of discovering the truth and communicating it: the solitary author can express his feelings, pass on information, persuade others to believe as he does, or charm others with his exquisite phrases (cf. Kinneavy’s taxonomy of the aims of writing). Finally, the solitary author sees his writing as a goal-directed piece of work, the process of producing a text” (366).

She claims that group work, collaborative brainstorming, etc., signal that the dominant model is again becoming too confining (much as the process model replaced the product model).

“I suggest that what goes on in these classes signals a growing awareness that language and texts are not simply the means by which individuals discover and communicate information, but are essentially social activities, dependent on social structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive phases” (366).

Cites earlier theorists that point to limitations of cognitive models: Bruffee; and Reither, who cites Larson, Odell, Bizzell, and Gage: “That is, writing and what writers do during writing cannot be artificially separated from the social-rhetorical situations in which writing gets done, from the conditions that enable writers to do what they do, and from the motives writers have for doing what they do” (Reither 621).

“What I would like to propose is an ecological model of writing, whose funda- mental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (367).

Explains that “ecological” is not “contextual” (367).

“An important characteristic of ecological systems is that they are inherently dynamic; though their structures and contents can be specified at a given moment, in real time they are constantly changing, limited only by parameters that are themselves subject to change over longer spans of time” (368).

Cooper’s ecological model situates the writer in larger social systems: the system of ideas, system of purposes, system of interpersonal relations, system of cultural norms, and the system of textual forms, for example. These systems form material constraints on the writer but are also “made and remade by writers in the act of writing” (368).

Cooper spends some time reviewing social conceptions of audience.

“Just as the ecological model transforms authors (people who have produced texts) into writers (people engaged in writing), it transforms the abstract “general audience” into real readers” (371-72).

“In the classroom, we can enable our students to see each other as real readers, not as stand-ins for a general audience. Students learn about how to deal with their readers not ‘by internalizing and generalizing the reactions of a number of specific readers’ and thereby developing a ‘sense of audience’ (Kroll, “Writing for Readers” 181), but by developing the habits and skills involved in finding readers and making use of their responses. Students, like all writers, need to find out what kind of readers best help them in the role of editor, how to work with co-writers, how to interpret criticisms, how to enter into dialogue with their addressees” (372).

“It is important to remember that the image the ecological model projects is again an ideal one. In reality, these systems are often resistent to change and not easily accessible. Whenever ideas are seen as commodities they are not shared; whenever individual and group purposes cannot be negotiated someone is shut out; differences in status, or power, or intimacy curtail interpersonal interactions; cultural institutions and attitudes discourage writing as often as they encourage it; textual forms are just as easily used as barriers to discourse as they are used as means of discourse” (373).

“Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting” (373).

Cites Barthes and Goffman in Works Cited, but does not mention them in the text.

Working in response to multiple competing hypotheses of how writing gets done, Flower & Hayes turn instead to establish “the” process as “a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (366).

They are working, if not oppositionally at least goadingly, to rhetorical constructions that explain how texts are created. In this way, their model seeks to place these questions of audience, purpose (Kinneavy), exigency (Bitzer v. Vatz), relation (Moffett and Gibson) on real grounds of what writers actually do and how real writers’ internal processes address these issues.

They are answering the “stage process models” of Pre-Write/ Write/Re-Write (Gordon Rohman) and of Conception/ Incubation/Production (Britton et al.) In this way, their model seeks to bring a recursive element to the process, complicating the static nature of these models.

The 3 key points the paper develops in addition to the definition above are:

• 2.These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other.
• 3. The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer’s own growing network of goals.
• 4. Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals which embody the writer’s developing sense of purpose, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing. (366)

Their model divides the writing process into mental hierarchical processes that may occur at any stage of the writing. “[I]dea generation, for example, is a sub-process of Planning” (367). One reason behind identifying the cognitive processes themselves is that then those processes can be placed on linear process models in order to identify strategies of “good and poor writers” (368).

“A model is a metaphor for a process: a way to describe something, such as the composing process, which refuses to sit still for a portrait. As a hypothesis about a dynamic system, it attempts to describe the parts of the system and how they work together” (368).

They use audio taped protocol analysis sessions to determine how real writers write.

“The act of writing involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: the task environment, the writer’s long-term memory, and the writing processes. The task environment includes all of those things outside the writer’s skin, starting with the rhetorical problem or assignment and eventually including the growing text itself. The second element is the writer’s long-term memory in which the writer has stored knowledge, not only of the topic, but of the audience and of various writing plans. The third element in our model contains writing processes themselves, specifically the basic processes of Planning, Translating, and Reviewing, which are under the control of a Monitor (369).

“[D]efining the rhetorical problem is a major, immutable part of the writing process. But the way in which people choose to define a rhetorical problem to themselves can vary greatly from writer to writer” (369).

“Poor writers will frequently depend on very abstract, undeveloped top-level goals, such as ‘appeal to a broad range of intellect,’ even though such goals are much harder to work with than a more operational goal such as ‘give a brief history of my job.’ Sondra Perl has seen this phenomenon in the basic writers who kept returning to reread the assignment, searching, it would seem, for ready-made goals, instead of forming their own. Alternatively, poor writers will depend on only very low-level goals, such as finishing a sentence or correctly spelling a word. They will be, as Nancy Sommers student revisers were, locked in by the myopia in their own goals and criteria” (379).

“We feel that a cognitive process explanation of discovery, toward which this theory is only a start, will have another special strength. By placing emphasis on the inventive power of the writer, who is able to explore ideas, to develop, act on, test, and regenerate his or her own goals, we are putting an important part of creativity where it belongs-in the hands of the working, thinking writer” (386).

They cite several Scardamalia articles all in press at the time.¹

1. Marlene Scardamalia, “How Children Cope with the Cognitive Demands of Writing,” in Writing: The Nature, Development and Teaching of Written Communication, ed. C. Frederiksen et al. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Eribaum Associates, in press). Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, “From Conversation to Composition: The Role of Instruction in a Developmental Process,” in Advances in Instructional Psychology, Volume 2, ed. R. Glaser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates