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Writing Processes, Revision, and Rhetorical Problems: A Note on Three Recent Articles

1983; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/358260

1939-9006

Richard C. Gebhardt,

Writing and Handwriting Education

first three articles in December, 1981, issue of College Composition and Communication--Flower and Hayes' A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing, Berkenkotter's Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience, and Witte and Faigley's Analyzing Revision--demonstrate that current research and theory on composition is insisting that rhetorical concerns of and purpose are integral to processes of writing, however complex we discover that those processes are. Revision, these articles affirm, is a complex activity within which rhetorical emphases are central. processes of writing are sufficiently complex, and sufficiently variable from writer to writer, that they cannot be reduced to a pat formula but demand models of great breadth and flexibility, but these processes have in common writers' attention to whether their words will achieve with readers specific goals writers seek. Berkenkotter's study of audience-awareness reveals that skilled writers automatically internalize their audiences and then use this sensed audience and their relationship to it to help them modify assigned writing tasks, select appropriate types of discourse, and make a wide range of rhetorical, organizational, and stylistic decisions while they write. But centrality of rhetorical concerns to process also is evident in importance, for revision, that Faigley and Witte give to such situational variables for composing as the reason why text is being written . . , writer's familiarity with writing task, writer's familiarity with subject, writer's familiarity with audience. And Flower and Hayes, as they describe writing processes as a whole, show that one significant dimension of task environment is the rhetorical problem, a factor which not only rhetorical situation and audience which prompt one to write, [but] also includes writer's own goals in writing. That defining and addressing a rhetorical problem is an essential step in processes of writing is not a new idea-a fact that is clear in Flower and Hayes' earlier work, for instance The Cognition of Discovery (CCC, Feb-