Linda Flower and John R. Hayes--"A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"

Linda Flower and John R. Hayes--"A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 365-387

The authors open the article by acknowledging the composing process as "a series of decisions and choices." They wonder what guides a writer's choices as they write. 

They cite the rhetorical situation, and the elaborations of Bitzer's scheme, as possible contributions to the composing process.

"This paper will introduce a theory of cognitive processes involved in composing in an effort to lay groundwork for more detailed study of thinking processes in writing." They use protocol analysis data collected over five years. 

Our cognitive process theory rests on four key points, which this paper will develop:

1. The process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing.
   
2. These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other.
   
3. The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer's own growing network of goals.
   
4. Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals which embody the writer's developing sense of purpose, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing. 
   

Writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing.  

• This contrasts the stage process model, a linear series of stages, separated in time, and characterized by the gradual development of the written product. 

• "The problem with stage descriptions of writing is that they model the growth of the written product, not the inner process of the person producing it...Because stage models take the final product as their reference point, they offer an inadequate account of the more intimate, moment-by-moment intellectual process of composing.

A Cognitive Process Model

• Represents a major paradigm shift from the stage-process theory.
• Psychologists and linguists build models of what they see to better understand the process. 
• Thinking aloud protocols allow capture a detailed record of what is going on in the writer's mind during the act of composing itself. Essentially, they provide a rhetorical situation and get a writer to narrate their thoughts aloud to a tape-recorder while they write. The written transcript is called a protocol.
•  The act for writing involves three major elements which are reflected in the three units of the model: 1) the task environment, 2)the writer's long-term memory, and 3) the writing processes.
• Task environment--all things outside the writer's own skin.

The Rhetorical Problem

• People only solve the process they define for themselves. Therefore, if the writing prompt or rhetorical situation isn't clearly defined, the student-writer could misinterpret the assignment. 
• 
  

Long-Term Memory

• Writers store topics and audience awareness, knowledge of writing plans and problem representations. 
• The problem with long-term memory is access. Writers must wait on a cue to access it. 
• Then the writer must adapt the tapped knowledge for the current situation.

Planning

• "In the planning process writers form an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used in writing...this representation...will not necessarily be made in language, but could be held as a visual or perceptual code, e.g., as a fleeting image the writer must then capture in words."
• This involves a number of sub-processes: generating ideas (accessing long-term memory); organization (identifies categories); goal-setting (I want to eventually do x).
• The sub-categories operate in a recursive manner. 
• The authors state that " the act of defining one's own rhetorical problem and setting goals is an important part of 'being creative' and can account for some important differences between good and poor writers.

Translating:

• Putting ideas into visible language.
• Similar to how planning can be non-verbal/non-coded; translating emphasizes the peculiar qualities of the task.
• The task is demanding because the author must negotiate global and local writing issues. 
• Since novice writers must focus on one issue, they can become frustrated and produce writing that exhibits poor planning and/or plentiful errors.

Reviewing:


The Monitor:

• The authors had someone watch the students and keep track of noticeable movements between stages of the writing process.

The Written Text

• Each word and sentence determines what can follow after.
• The control composing can have on a text can vary.  If the text is incoherent, it didn't exert enough control of what followed.

2. The processes of writing are hierarchically organized, with component processes embedded within other components.

• The authors see writing as a hierarchical system that is not linear. It contains one large process (composing) that subsumes other smaller acts (planning) that can contain even smaller component parts. It's like a picture within a picture...a dream within a dream 
• Writers encounter problems during composing (translating) and perform a shortened version of this process--they review, plan, transcribe, review, etc. 
• This type of writing process is powerful because it's flexible.
• We don't need to define "revision" as a unique stage in composing, but something that a writer can do whenever they want to review what they've written. 

3. Writing is a goal-directed process. In the act of composing, writers create a hierarchical network of goals and these in turn guide the writing process.

• Writing is both an act of discovery and purposeful. 
• People forget their local goals, so writing protocols help recall things that retrospection cannot. 
• Process Goals-the instruction people give themselves about how to carry out the process of writing.
• Content Goals-specify the things the writer wants to say in the writing, which further grows in to a network of goals and sub-goals.
• People create network goals as they compose. The goal-directed thinking takes many forms and is intimately connected with discover. 
• The writer's self-made goals drive composing, but these goals can be inclusive and exploratory or narrow, sensitive to the audience or chained to the topic, based on rhetorical savvy or focused on producing correct prose. 
• Writer's not only create a hierarchical network of guiding goals, but, as they compose, they continually return or "pop" back up to their higher-level goals, which give coherence and direction to their next move. 
• Low-level writers usually produce low-level goals--finish a sentence; correctly spell a word. 

Goals, Topic, and Text

• The authors acknowledge that goals might join in a writer's knowledge of a topic and memory to move the composing process. 
• These outside forces can interrupt the process much the same way the writers recursively generate and evaluate during the transcribing process. 
• "Behind the most free-wheeling act of 'discovery' is a writer who has recognized the heuristic value of free exploration or 'just writing it out' and has chosen to do so. 
• "We think that the remarkable combination of purposefulness and openness which writing offers is based in part on a beautifully simple, but extremely powerful principle: In the act of writing, people regenerate or recreate their own goals in the light of what they learn. This principle then creates the fourth point of our cognitive process theory.

4. Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating goals and supporting sub-goals which embody a purpose; and, at times, by changing or regenerating their own top-level goals in light of what they have learned by writing.

• Writers organize two basic processes--create sub-goals as they write and regenerate or change the goals which had been directing their writing and planing (creating sub-goals and regenerating goals)--in different ways.
• They Explore and Consolidate; State and Develop; and Write and Regenerate

Explore and Consolidate

• "The distinctive thing about good writers is their tendency to return to that higher-level goal and to review and consolidate what has just been learned through exploring. In the act of consolidating, the writer sets up a new goal which replaces the goal of explore and directs the subsequent episode in composing.

State and Develop

• This accounts for much of the composing work. "In it the writer begins with a relatively general high-level goal which he then proceeds to develop or flesh out with sub-goals. As his goals become more fully specified, they form a bridge from his initial rather fuzzy intentions to actual text."

Write and Regenerate

• Similar to the explore and consolidate pattern, but in it the writer is producing prose.

Conclusion:

• "Writers and teachers of writing have long argued that one learns through the act of writing itself, but it has been difficult to support the claim in other ways. However, if one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate new, more complex goals, one can see this learning process in action. Furthermore, one sees why the process of revising and clarifying goals has such a broad effect, since it is through setting these new goals that the fruits of discovery come back to inform the continuing process of writing."

***My thoughts: This 1981 study utilizes think-alouds to monitor the cognitive strategies of writers. What are we doing to further this understanding given the furthering of technology? Could it be as simple as recording--via screen capture--the student's composing process and noting how the text changes?