For me, this particular view of the writing process is too mechanistic, but I can see how it might be useful in certain contexts. Honestly, trying to turn writing into science gives me a headache, but I feel like a lot of people would argue with me about the validity of this cognitivist model and how it can help us as teachers.
What mainly struck and stuck with me about the Flower and Hayes view was that we often see writing as a linear, stage process model, and this isn’t realistic. “Such models are typically silent on the inner processes of decision and choice.” Rather than pre-writing, writing and re-writing in three distinct stages, writers constantly plan, write and revise as they go; in no particular order. In my experience, when process is taught so linearly, writers are held back from exploring freely, and are blocked. A student might be inspired to start writing, begin a draft, and then feel stuck after realizing that they “broke a rule” and did not pre-write first. This goes back to Rose’s and Sommner’s ideas of revising, and is also where integrating cognitive process theory into a composition course might really benefit students.
The theory has four main points: 1) writing is a set of distinctive thinking processes; writers organize when they compose; 2) the processes are hierarchical and can be embedded within each other; 3) composing is goal-directed; and 4) writers create goals by setting high-level and sub-goals; the goals change based on what the writer learns during the process.
It seems that in a way, we’re taking Murray’s writing process idea and understanding it from a more cognitivist, scientific standpoint, which is sort of a paradox. The cognitivist theory, however, does seem to incorporate both process theory and the idea of learning, exploring and discovering through writing, so perhaps there is a lot of usefulness in it. I feel that I should spend a lot more time studying these ideas and discussing them before I can answer more questions, come to more conclusions, or understand how to design a writing course based on this theory.
I agree with you that writers are blocked when they are forced to write to a linear structure which happened to me many times as well; therefore, Flower and Hayes’s theory since it is recursive in its nature is a big step towards freedom.
ReplyDeleteMeredith,
ReplyDeleteWhat you've said about the pitfalls of pre-writing, or writing oneself into a corner and getting blocked, really rings true for me. I have actually experienced topic burnout as a result of too many, or too strictly defined, pre-writing activities like annotated outlines. I think a heavily process-oriented curriculum can inadvertently go beyond making students more aware of how they write, and actually make them overly self-conscious so that they write around and around writing without actually asserting their ideas. For me, this is what makes the cognitivist approach seductive, because it gives some agency to processes that the student might not even be aware of, as though part of the work of writing is being done without the student trying to micro-manage the process. So I agree with you that the cognitivist theory does somehow incorporate ideas from process theory, but I'm still not sure how to extract elements from the two and synthesize them into something useful in the classroom!
Meredith-
ReplyDeleteI also thought about Murray as I read the Hayes and Flower article. The blend of the traditional phases of pre-writing, writing, and re-writing resemble Murray’s notion of writing as an ongoing, recursive, and messy process. Additionally, student goals seem to set the stage for the writing process in both the cognitivist and the expressivist approaches to writing.