Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process

Abstract

Composition Studies was transformed when theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing began trying to find out what actually happens when people write. Over the last decade or so, members of the discipline have striven primarily to discover and teach the special kinds of thinking, the processes, that occur during composing.' The goal has been to replace a prescriptive pedagogy (select a subject, formulate a thesis, outline, write, proofread) with a descriptive discipline whose members study and teach not product. Although the methodologies of process research have been challenged, its contributions to our understanding of composing have been applauded by theorists and practitioners alike. The consensus has generally been that process researchers have done a good job of answering the questions they have asked. Still, some are beginning to point to questions that, if they've been raised at all, have certainly not been answered. Richard Larson, for example, has asked, How does the impulse to write arise? And, How does the writer identify the elements needed for a solution [to a rhetorical problem], retrieve from memory or find in some other source(s) the items needed in the solution, and then test the trial solution to see whether it answers the problem? (250-251).

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