Nobody Speaks for the Text (But Everyone is Welcome to Speak)

More than anything else, the process of planning our curated annotated bibliography helped complicate the notion of theoretical turns in our field. We came up with the concept of "What's at Stake" in order to clearly define the role that each of these has played in our discipline, in our epistemologies, and in our pedagogy. In trying to trace where these authors land in the history of Composition theory, we found that we were oversimplifying their arguments, misrepresenting them through the act of presenting a singular representation of their role in Composition studies. For example, William Irmscher claims that writing is "a way of promoting the higher intellectual development of the individual" and thus we might say that Irmscher is advocating a process pedagogy in which we teach students how to engage in writing processes that promote intellectual development at the individual level. But if we place this as his "What's at Stake" contribution to pedagogy, we miss the point he makes very briefly in the introduction of his paper that "we need the cross-fertilization of our discipline with others" and his emphasis that writing be taught within other disciplines as well. Or, we might turn to his exploration of verbalization via Robert Gagne and Ernest Smith, in which he advocates that verbalizing our words allows our writing tasks to be more complex, noting that it leads to "fuller understanding" (241). He expounds on this by discussing Janet Emig's claim that writing is a unique activity in which hand, eye, and brain become unified through one continuous activity. In discussing hand, eye, and brain coordination, might we understand Irmscher as advocating for a cognitive process theory to writing similar to that of Flower and Hayes?

Or if we understand Flower and Hayes' research in "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" as one that demonstrates to our field that scientific observation of a "good" writing process is impossible to trace and teach, how do we reconcile with the fact that Flower and Hayes did in fact learn a great deal about good and bad writing processes? If we focus on the point that Don Pierstoff makes--that Flower and Hayes' "experiments in protocol analysis were affected in as yet unidentified ways when [writers] were being observed in the act of composing"--without also recognizing how groundbreaking and helpful their model is to the field, what do we lose? If we understand their contributions through cognitive science without considering that at its root this is a cognitive process, how do we position them within the field? As asinine as it now seems to me to be, I have always placed Flower and Hayes as these pseudo-scientists of sort who attempted to bring science into the field of Composition and were helpful in demonstrating that scientific observations don't really belong in our field. Or rather, through attempting to chart a singular "good" writing process, they learned that there isn't a "good" writing process, but instead writers develop unique, hierarchical processes that are layered into what we might call "the writing process." After negotiating this with Brandon and reconsidering Flower and Hayes' piece as an extension and illumination of process theory rather than a departure from it, I can understand Flower and Hayes in different ways--as a key part of both the process turn (that writing processes are multiple, idiosyncratic, hierarchical, nonlinear) and the cognitive turn (that writing processes can be researched and better understood through cognitive research and experiments). Thus, there is overlap. This occurs because these are frameworks and constructs that scholars put up based on their own construction of the text and negotiation of its meaning.

This is exemplified by Michael Carter's own exploration of cognitive and social dimensions of writing. Cognitive rhetoric is rhetoric founded on information processing theories of psychology and emphasizes general knowledge. Social rhetoric is based on social theories of knowledge and emphasizes local knowledge. He points out that those advocating for social rhetoric and local expertise, such as Patricia Bizzell, sees the work of Flower and Hayes' and other cognitive theorists as "overemphasizing the 'universal, fundamental structures of thought and language'" (Bizzell 215, qtd in Carter 265). Carter himself points out that in the work of Flower and Hayes, "the individual subject is treated as a way of testing universal theories of problem solving" (266). Carter builds an argument for seeing the general and the local on a "continuum" in which the general becomes the local. In other words, novice writers begin with general conceptions of what a writing process is or does, and those general conceptions develop into local strategies as the writer becomes more familiar with the writing task(s) at hand. Is this contradicting the discoveries of Flower and Hayes? Absolutely not--Flower and Hayes' claims that writing tasks are generally hierarchical, nonlinear, shifting over time, idiosyncratic, etc. is still true, and in fact suggests that what we can generally know about writers is that their goals are local, their writing process is local in the sense that it belongs to them and is dictated by their experiences with writing (as detailed in discussions of long-term memory and the role it has in reading rhetorical tasks and then working on them), etc. This suggests that we bring our local and global theories of writing together rather than make them compete. We can only do this by always reminding ourselves that meaning of text is negotiated, that texts are not confined to a certain time and that they continue to function and have an effect on the field. 

JB


Carter, Michael. “The Idea of Expertise: An Exploration of Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 41, no. 3, 1990, pp. 265-286.

Flower, Linda, and Hayes, John R. “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, 365-387.

Irmscher, William F. “Writing as a Way of Learning and Developing.” CCC 30.3 (Oct. 1979): 240-44.

Check out our glossary draft here.