Who Knows?: The Agency of Writers in Pursuit of Knowledge

This week’s readings complicated our understanding of the process movement, raising questions about the roles and agency of the author, their audience, and the rhetorical situation. It also illustrates a more person-centric model in the post-process movement, where writers’ processes are seen as much more idiosyncratic than the process movement prescribes due to the way individual writers have vastly different cognitive processes. They all approach these ideas by discussing classroom writing instruction, with most of them advocating for a more student-centered classroom that encourages play and introspection. However, each of the theorists vary widely from one another in approach, with some taking a more expressivist stance (like Murray, Elbow) and others more formalistic/formulaic (like Carter or Flower and Hayes).

Muarray argues for a much more individual and writer-centered way to approach composition processes, stating that the students are where writing must begin, identifying their own subjects because “the student may be shown how to perceive, but he has to do his own perceiving” (119), build their own opinions and knowledge from that identification because “the student should begin to discover the vigor of writing doesn’t come so much from the graceful stroke of his pen as from the incisive bit of his intellect” (119), to “earn an audience” and learn to write not just at/for/to an audience, but also to “learn and be a constructively critical audience so his classmates will learn”  (120), and finally, to “find his own form” (120); as the student learns these, they must also realize that “freedom is the greatest tyrant of all” (118). Maurray’s approach gives the student the agency to not only decide their exigencies and begin their writing, but to explore and learn in an environment that both encourages and complicates that process by forcing them to be critical as they learn to compose.

Flower and Hayes propose a “cognitive process” model of composition, which situates itself as a formula that is non-linear and cyclical, based around the writer’s individual knowledge and thinking process. They achieved their model by asking writers to compose whilst verbalizing their thoughts to the best of their abilities into an unobtrusive tape recorder. Pierstorff does criticize them for the data collection, as he argues that the act of observation inherently changes the results (which makes sense, as I can think of few, if any, people who compose aloud at any part of their writing process, and I know I would find it distracting as I attempted to find the proper words instead of just being able to let my brain makes connections without me having to turn them into verbal thoughts). However, this model definitely captures the nature of a writing process as fluid and recursive, allowing for individual agency as they compose instead of prescribing a model and shoehorning people into it (as the stages model tends to do). Their emphasis on the goals of the writer being a major component of the planning process, with “the most important thing about writing goals is the fact that they are created by the writer” (373), show that not only is the agency found within the writer as they create/respond to a writing exigence, but that agency afforded through goal-setting is present throughout the entire composing process, which “lead to new, more complex goals which can then integrate content and purpose,” (373) again showing the recursive nature of composing processes.

Irmcherr’s more explicitly epistemological approach to writing processes emphasizes the student writer’s experience and knowledge, privileging the student’s experiences and agency within the process from the very start by stating that “in writing, this externalizing and internalizing occur at one and the same time,” and that “through writing, we learn by coming aware of ourselves” (242). The act of composing is a way for students to investigate their own knowledge and to identify shortcomings, regardless of where the initial exigence for writing comes. He argues that “control of language ultimately translates into self-confidence and self-sufficiency” (244), which again illustrates that writing-as-learning ultimately lends all of the agency within the writer and requires active participation and constant cycles of personal analysis and external analysis to make sure that what you understand is accurate and coming across to your audience sufficiently.  

Carter, however, argues for an approach that is much less writer-directed and much more audience-based. It seems to reduce the agency of the writer as an active agent engaged in knowledge-making to more of a receptacle of conventions that can be transferred across contexts, while still maintaining that expertise is developed over years via localized knowledge, or in his words: “human performance is a complex interaction of general and local knowledge” (271). He places the agency within the exigencies and contexts of the writing situations to determine how they should be responded to, but writers seem to gain control over these as they develop domain expertise in writing (and, it appears, within the discipline they are writing within). He attempts to bridge the gap between local and global/general, and places much of the power in the writer’s ability to understand discourse communities, as he advocates that teachers “help students acquire appropriate local knowledge, to become a part of a writing community as defined by certain domain-specific knowledge” (281) whilst also giving them general writing tools. It would seem his argument is that the more expertise a writer gains, the more general knowledge they can transfer and more domain-specific knowledge they have about the discourse communities with which they want/need to communicate, the more agency they have over the writing.

Altogether, the theorists we read for this week all complicate the idea of student agency when composing, and, taken together, seem to all argue for composition that emphasizes the individual writer’s agency in the composing process as they create knowledge and utilize language to convey that knowledge. While they each provide a different perspective and approach, these theories mentioned above all attempt to shift the field away from rigid composing structures toward a more fluid and writer-based approach.


--Caitlin