Tobin is the man! Okay, so is Murray.

Twice this week I sat down to read for class, only covering a bit of ground, when my husband somehow assumed it was an invitation to chat. I tried to ignore his conversational advances, but eventually I had to move to another room. He didn’t get the hint and followed me. Grrr! (This is my best attempt at a written growl.) Last night, I again sat down to make my way through some readings, and he wants to play a guessing game. Even when I asked to be left alone, he would only do it if I answered one more question! I don’t know about everyone who reads these essays, but it really takes all of my concentration for some of these essays. And, I mistakenly read Tobin and Murray first and found myself facing the prospect of whether to read Ede and Lunsford or Flower and Hayes. I started with Ede and Lunsford, but I just could not comprehend the whole audience addressed and audience invoked thing and gave up at the third page. I mean, I get the idea that audience is important and that as writers we must sometimes fictionalize our audience, but that’s where it ended. So, it was Flower and Hayes by default.
First, let me just say I love Tobin’s candidness, honesty, and forthright writing style. Like Tobin, one of my criticisms has been the idealization of the results of many of the theorists who have written about how process writing has dramatically changed their composition instruction and results. They make it seem so easy and my attempts at the same have not been as fruitful. But Tobin has allowed me to realize I have to find my own style of teaching composition, incorporating some Atwell, Murray, and Elbow, but also staying within my comfort zone—far away from the strict formats of yesteryear, of course. Tobin brought back some of those (painful?) memories from junior high and high school when everything we did had to follow a very strict format, from the specified number and color of notecards to the number of words required for each assigned paper. Although I only remember writing about four “big” papers during all four years of high school, I do remember those tedious grammar lessons and the insistence that we submit an outline for our paper along with the paper, which I always did after I completed the paper. Oh, I would pretend to have one, but it always changed before I handed it in. It all seems so silly now when I look back on it. And, as Tobin reminisces, we never peer reviewed or workshopped or read our essays during class, let alone discuss how writers find their ideas or that writer’s block was a normal thing. We had to know what we were writing before we wrote it. We were not encouraged to let our writing take us to another place or to generate new meaning. I struggled to write, struggled to put my thoughts on paper. The grammar lessons and strict procedures provided nothing to help me become a proficient writer and confident writer. Because I have some relative freedom this semester with one class I am teaching, I am trying to guide my students down a different path from whence I came. I am having my students share their writing in class, some reluctantly. I want to provide them opportunities to generate meaning as they write. I want them to take ownership. So far, I am really excited about what is taking place. A few whom I had dismissed as only basic writers are stepping up to the challenge, producing some interesting and engaging pieces. And, I would like to think that the effort I make to respond to my students' writing and the respect I show them at what they are trying to do is beginning to pay off.
Okay, now onto Linda Flower—who I know can be excruciatingly dense—and John Hayes and their essay, “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.” I am a little annoyed that they misstated Britton’s answer to the question of what guides a writer’s decisions as he writes. I don’t see where he says that syntactic and lexical choices guide the process—he actually says, “It is tempting to think of writing as a process of making linguistic choices form one’s repertoire of syntactic structures and lexical items.” He uses the word tempting and then asks how it happens. Am I missing something here? Anyway, Flower and Hayes do provide some logical answers when it comes to answering this question. Interestingly, they discuss how children “possess the skills necessary to generate ideas, but lack the kind of monitor which tells them to “keep using” that skill and generate a little more. Couldn’t this be related to brain development itself? I’m thinking of an article I read in TIME magazine wherein a study was conducted on the brains of three or four brothers as they reached the age of 25 or so. The scientists involved in the study concluded that full brain development doesn’t happen till we hit 25, which explains the stupid decisions kids make and the stupid things they do. Could this fact also contribute to the composition process? Maybe this explains why my own writing and love of writing did not develop till later. I must admit, I laughed at the idea of using thinking aloud protocols to study the process of writing. First, reality is lacking. There is no way we can honestly verbalize all the things we are thinking about as we write. And, even though the tape recorder would be “unobtrusive,” we would still be aware we are being recorded. That’s like writing a “real” letter to someone knowing that others would be reading and analyzing it. It just isn’t the real world.
Although I would agree with their answers to the question posed, I firmly believe that a writer’s relationship with the text is a huge factor in the writing process and the decisions we make. Is it a love affair or are we simply tolerating a co-worker or family member? Think about it. If we are sincerely interested and passionate about our subject, then we will likely approach it in a loving way. We will nurture and caress it. If it is something we must do, whether it is a school assignment or something we are to generate in the workplace, then our approach will likely be standoffish and cold. We will invest less of ourselves in it, thus changing our process and the decisions we make.