"Process and Intention: A Bridge from Theory to Classroom” is rooted in a time when intuitive, experience-based awareness that we should "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" (Murray 3) was bolstered by systematic research into the complexity of writing. Lots of years have passed since those days, so as a reminder, let me mention five 1970s researchers whose work seemed to me then (and still does, for that matter) to suggest a complex idea of writing as a dynamic interaction of brain, hand, and eye.
Janet Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning” (1977) draws on work in psychology, physiology, education, and other fields to describe writing as a complex activity in which several different means of dealing with actuality—enactive, by doing (hand), iconic, via image (eye), and symbolic, through words (brain)--“are simultaneously or almost simultaneously deployed” (10).
Sharon Pianko’s “Reflection: A Critical Component of the Composing Process” (1979) emphasizes the importance, during writing, of reflection (e.g., pausing to rescan completed text to make changes, to bridge to more writing, to reflect on plans, etc.).
Nancy Sommers’s “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” (1980) defines revision not as a separate, final stage of writing but as “a sequence of changes in a composition—changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work” (45).
Sondra Perl’s “Understanding Composing” (1980) explores the concept of projective structuring by which writers measure against possible reader needs their intentions for a piece of writing and the direction in which they sense the piece is developing before them as they write.
Linda Flower’s and John Hayes’s “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” (1981) offers a complex description of writing based on cognitive psychology, the most lasting element of which perhaps is the multi-box diagram a few pages into their article.
Key Phrases:
- the writing-process research movement
- blended cognitive/social approaches
Gebhardt's Own WAW Greatest Hits Contributions:
- “Initial Plans and Spontaneous Composition: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of the Writing Process” (1982)
- “Writing Processes, Revision, and Rhetorical Problems” (1983)
- “Changing and Editing: Moving Current Theory on Revision into the Classroom” (1984)
- “Computer Writing and the Dynamics of Drafting” (1986)
On Collaborative Writing (throughout the writing process)
“Teamwork and Feedback: Broadening the Base of Collaborative Writing” (College English, 1980)
