Linda Flower Research Articles

Exploring Options in Composing

Many of the writing processes that accomplished writers engage in have been catalogued in recent years because of sophisticated basic research on composing. Thanks to Janet Emig, Sondra Perl, Nancy Sommers, Linda Flower, and John Hayes, composing theory has moved beyond the old linear stage of composition (prewriting, writing, revising) to a recognition that composing activities are more recursive than linear, more flexible than constrained. Moreover, Flower and Hayes have constructed new models of the composing process that acknowledge and incorporate activities like using the memory, assessing the rhetorical situation, and rescanning written drafts during production. Sommers, Lester Faigley, and Steven Witte--among othershave begun to investigate particular facets of the composing process (especially revision) so that the dynamics of each activity are becoming better understood. All of this basic research has given teachers of writing a better understanding of the ways their students compose. 1 Nevertheless, applications of such research to the composition classroom have not always been as sophisticated as this basic research. Since problems with students' written products can frequently be traced with some confidence to the students' not having engaged in particular composing activities, and since one aim of applied research on composing has been to identify and less efficient composing habits, teachers have been encouraged to intervene in and to modify their students' writing habits. That much is understandable, even laudable, as long as the implicit behaviorism behind those interventions is kept within limits.2 But not so laudable, it seems to me, are overly prescriptive interventions and modifications. A survey of the literature on composing indicates that too often teachers attempt to impose a single, ideal composing style on their students. They direct students to adopt specific planning, invention, and revision tactics during every composing experiJack Seizer teaches rhetoric, composition, and technical writing at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published articles in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication and in New Essays in Scientific and Technical Communication, and in such journals of literary scholarship as Studies in Philology and Philological Quarterly. He is currently studying seventeenth-century rhetorical theory and conducting research on composing processes.

Teaching Writing with Computer Aids

For teachers concerned with improving student writing, there have been two extremes in instructional strategy. Teachers who give ad hoc advice or who run their classes like writing workshops can individualize instruction and treat papers as unified wholes, but they repeat themselves often. (Or they can refer students to handbooks with a set of cryptic marking symbols-dev, agr, / /which students rarely decipher and check.) The second extreme involves class use of a textbook according to a fixed syllabus. This practice usually follows a developmental or chronological progression-from words to sentences to paragraphs to essays; or from prewriting to writing to editing. Yet recent empirical studies of writing show that composition is not a series of discrete, chronologically ordered tasks, but rather a complex of recursive, embedded activities (Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing, CCC, 32 [1981], 365-387). The systematized order of a textbook, then, may not meet the needs of any particular student. However, now teachers can use computer programs and word processing to combine the systematic coverage of a writing class with the individualization of a writing workshop. This paper reports on the educational philosophy and practice I have been developing to incorporate computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and word processing in a freshman English class. Students use Apple microcomputers with the word-processing program APPLEWRITER II along with other programs for CAI and text-feedback. However, the ideas for integrating computer aids into the composition class can be adapted for use with other systems (or have alternate forms, as noted in the references). Word processing can change the way students write and their attitudes toward writing. In fact, the protean malleability of text with word processing is ideally suited for tutoring students in writing improvement.' Writing is not like arithmetic with discrete, masterable component units. It is more like producing a sym-

Response to Anthony Petrosky, Review of Linda Flower, Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing

Professor Petrosky's review of Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing raises one crucial question I think a review of a writing text should raise: what theoretical assumptions about the psychology of writing underlie this book? However, he uses the occasion to attack an out-moded, logical positivist version of communication theory that treats thought as an object to be transferred and that ignores the constructive nature of both reading and writing. I am perplexed that he reads my book as an example of this position-a position which neither of us holds. communication model, with its senders and receivers, which he attributes to me is, in the book, in fact attributed to its real source (electrical engineers-the work of Shannon and Weaver in the 1940's). I present the model as a familiar but inadequate metaphor the reader will want to go beyond (We often talk about communication as if it were a physical process One problem with this model is that it turns the writer into a delivery boy. .. . This model, however, has a limitation ..). In context, the main function of the two-page passage he cites so extensively was to challenge that very model and to introduce a ten-page section entitled The Creative Reader, which draws on current research describing the constructive nature of reading. Just as writers work with metaphor, intuition, and images, as well as logic, in order to compose, readers likewise build rich and sometimes surprisingly original internal structures in their effort to comprehend. Although Professor Petrosky and I clearly differ on how to write a textbook-on what ideas to value, on how explicit one should try to be about thinking processes-I do not believe that my position or the book itself fits into the unattractive pigeonhole he has in mind. As a teacher, I see no contradiction at all between fostering the experience of discovery, of listening to readers, of reseeing one's own ideas-things we all value and teach towardand asking students to bring a more self-conscious, problem-solving approach to their writing. I have difficulty imagining any serious teacher who would. premise which underlies my commitment to teaching heuristics is that writing is not a rule-governed act; nor is it so essentially mysterious that little can be said about it or taught. My goal is to offer students a repertoire of alternative strategies for dealing with this complex process. Trying to be articulate about the thinking processes you would teach may be risky, but I think it is necessary. In taking a strategic approach to writing, one offers writers some of the power that comes from an awareness of one's own thinking processes and a sense of options. Our discipline is growing in the depth and diversity of its theories. If we

Talking about Protocols

The process theory of writing, expounded by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes in the December, 1981 issue of College Composition and Communication and elsewhere, is attractive; as they argue, it improves on previous theories of composing by emphasizing the processes followed by the writer instead of describing stages in the completion of the product and by better accounting for the recursive nature of those processes through the use of a hierarchical rather than a linear description. But their casual reliance on unarticulated theories and an unsound methodology, while it does nothing to detract from our intuitive satisfaction with their conclusions, deprives them of any real support. Our acceptance of such work, if we accord it, will lead us away from, rather than toward, valid understanding of how writers write. Two facets of their work are particularly questionable: their theory of cognitive processes and their methodology for producing and analyzing protocols. Neither of these facets is new with Flower and Hayes. The cognitive processes they descry in writing are in large part those processes involved in purposive behavior. In discussing writing as a goal-directed activity, they rely on the concepts of goals, plans, and scripts developed by cognitive psychologists.1 But their discussion obfuscates much that is clear in their sources and thus seriously weakens their claims for the validity of their theory. Their methodology for psychological research dates from Plato and was made scientifically respectable in the nineteenth-century by Wilhelm Wundt, who named it introspection. But early and late critics of introspection have emphasized the limitations of the methodology, precisely as it is applied to the investigation of cognitive processes--limitations that Flower and Hayes ignore. In what follows we will discuss first the troublesome problems with their theory, and then pass on to the more serious problems with their methodology. In elaborating their model of the composing process, Flower and Hayes, especially in their most recent work, seem to ignore its status as a model and

Composing Responses to Literary Texts: A Process Approach

Teachers of literature who recognize that writing is a mode of discovery as well as a mode of communication are beginning to make use of informal or exploratory writing in their classes. In his essay, From Story to Essay: Reading and Writing, for instance, Anthony Petrosky illustrates the usefulness of response statements in a graduate seminar on reading and psychology which he taught at the University of Pittsburgh. He argues that having students write about their initial impressions allows them to make links between their reading and their own experience. Students become active participants in the creation of meaning. They compose their understandings of texts, and their compositions become indicators of their level of comprehension.' In their enthusiasm to introduce students to the uses of exploratory writing, however, teachers sometimes forget that response statements are means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Response is only the initial stage in a complex process. Teachers who are interested in having students revise their initial impressions of texts into finished essays need to be aware not only of the usefulness of exploratory writing, but also of ways in which exploratory writing can be transformed into writing which makes sense to an audience. They need to understand the nature of the process of responding to literary texts, a process, quite obviously, which involves reading as well as writing. Research on the nature of the composing process is helpful in elucidating the broad outlines of the process of responding to literature. James Britton and Linda Flower describe the pattern of change which frequently occurs as writers move from expressive writing, to use Britton's term, or from writing, to use Flower's term, toward essays which communicate ideas to an audience.2 Writers initially write to and for themselves, and so early drafts of essays are frequently characterized by an absence of statements showing causal relations, citation of evidence, or development of ideas. Expressive or writer-based writing is writing close to the self, writing

Response to Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"

Response to Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"

Modeling: A Process Method of Teaching

The shift from product to process in the teaching of writing has altered our thinking and re-routed our theories, but how much of the change in emphasis has really filtered down to our daily teaching? We still measure the effectiveness of our students' writing skills and of our pedagogical efforts by looking only at written products. At the diagnostic end of our teaching, when we ask ourselves what each student needs to learn, we also continue mainly to examine what we see on student papers. We may discuss the writing process, but do we have strategies and methods which are attuned to teaching a process? In writing labs, workshop classrooms, conferences, and other one-to-one instructional settings, there is a particularly urgent need for more appropriate diagnostic, teaching, and evaluation tools because the students sitting next to us usually ask questions about the composing process: don't know how to begin. do I start? Or, can't seem to say what I mean on paper. What do I do? Even when these writers look at their products, they still ask for help with the process: How can I make this better? With the switch from product to process comes the need for methods 1. to teach writing processes, 2. to diagnose problems with the process of composing, and 3. to evaluate the success of process teaching. In part we can meet these needs by borrowing tools from other fields. Two particularly powerful tools that I have found to be a useful combination for diagnosis and teaching in the tutorial or conference setting are used by our colleagues down the hall in psychology-protocol analysis and modeling. The fruitfulness of the verbal or protocol, in which subjects are asked to say out loud everything they are thinking as they write, has already been amply demonstrated by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes in their research on the writing process. The thinking-aloud protocols studied by Flower and Hayes are not complete records of mental processes. However, they are still rich sources Muriel Harris is an associate professor of English and director of the writing lab at Purdue University. She is the editor of Tutoring Writing: A Sourcebook for Writing Labs (Scott, Foresman, 1982) and also is the editor of the Writing Lab Newsletter. Currently she is doing protocol analysis with student writers, writing a series of self-instruction modules on writing skills for engineering and technology students, and working with a colleague on a textbook on paragraphing.