1977. Brent Henze
the title Writing without Teachers implies, expressivists fundamentally held that formal instruction was more or less incidental to a writer’s growth. Students were regarded as independent agents—even teachers and textbooks were irrelevant—who could intuit principles of effective writing through trial and error. The material of writing came from the student’s own subjective background, the teacher could “never quarrel with the student’s experience” (Elbow 106), and a writing course was thus a matter of a teacher’s nurturing student self-discovery and self-expression. All of these values were already guiding the pedagogy of Donald Murray, who would nurture expressivism into the 1980s: in 1977 Murray was developing an expressivist-process synthesis that was beholden to creative writing workshops and that would find its most mature expression first in his 1978 publication “Write Before Writing” and then in his 1980 “Writing As Process: How Writing Finds Its Own Meaning.” All of these values were also getting theoretical sanction from the instructive sections on expressive discourse in James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse (1971) and from James Britton’s appreciation of expressive discourse in Language and Learning (1970) and The Development of Writing Abilities (1975; the American paperback edition appeared first in 1977).
In their concern for self-discovery rather than communicative effectiveness, however, expressivists clashed with those in the new cognitivist school, which by 1970 was beginning to compete with the expressivist school as the dominant process approach to composition. After all, Janet Emig in her 1971 book The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders had drawn attention not only to the composing processes of writers but also to the mental processes that writers employ while composing. A fierce critic of current-traditional approaches (Crowley, Composition 200–01), Emig also established that professional writers as well as students relied on identifiable mental devices and activities that stimulated composition. By the mid-1970s Linda Flower and John R. Hayes at Carnegie Mellon University were studying through a distinctly cognitive lens the composing processes employed by actual writers, students as well as professionals, in an effort to understand empirically the processes involved in composing. Hayes, a psychologist, teamed with Flower to learn more about how the mind tackles the problem of writing. In December of 1977 Flower and Hayes published in College English their groundbreaking essay “Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process,” a manifesto to their approach to process. They rejected the view of writing as the observance of fixed rules and models and instead called for a more strategic, cognitive “problem-solving” approach: since writing consisted, they felt, of a “hierarchical set of subproblems” tackled iteratively, such as planning and organizing, they offered a set of heuristics to “give the writer self-conscious access to some of the thinking techniques” that good writers use to “generate ideas in language and [. . .] construct those ideas into a written structure” suitable for a specific situation (449, 451). And they were embarking on a research program that would soon generate a series of essays, a 1978 conference, and a set of essays based on that conference, Cognitive Processes in Writing, edited by their Carnegie Mellon colleagues Lee Gregg and Erwin Steinberg in 1980. Research by Flower and Hayes was already contributing to pedagogy by broadening instructors’ conceptions of the writing process and by enabling instructors to develop “strategies for helping student writers to discover their intentions,” including prewriting and inventional strategies, planning and organizational strategies, editing strategies, and so on (Faigley, Fragments 30)—all of which were quickly added to pedagogical efforts throughout the nation. Moreover, Flower and Hayes encouraged teachers to understand the writing process as a set of layered cognitive activities involving not just broad activities like “pre-writing” or “revising” but also specific activities practiced by good writers, such as “setting up goals,” “finding operators,” and “testing your writing against your own editor” (“Problem-Solving” 457–58); in each case Flower and Hayes articulated not only how these strategies worked cognitively but also where they fit into the larger process of writing. Flower and Hayes were not embraced universally or uncritically (Ann Berthoff, from a position in aesthetics and philosophy, was already especially withering in dismissing what she regarded as the cognitivists’ compartmentalization of mental processes); but by 1977 most composition handbooks had come to acknowledge, at least superficially and at most substantially, that writing was a process whose stages ought to be considered in some way by writing teachers—though, as Flower and Hayes pointed out, advocates of process pedagogy tended to take “different roads to the same territory.”16 Most newer textbooks incorporated chapters on invention techniques such as brainstorming and freewriting (products of the expressivists’ approach), describing these strategies and providing exercises to guide students through them; and most offered detailed advice about revision as well.
On a final note, as Janice Lauer indicates in her sidebar, one of the key influences on the movement toward process—the reemergence of interest in rhetoric, especially classical rhetoric and rhetorical invention (a development that we discuss later in this chapter)—matured in the second half of the 1960s. Partly because of James Berlin’s categorizing of the expressive and cognitive schools, this influence has been insufficiently acknowledged in accounts of process pedagogies, but the new rhetorical studies were surely not without implications for process-minded scholars and teachers in 1977.
The Impact of Linguistics
Even as the process movement was taking wing, in part under the aegis of breakthroughs in cognitive psychology, other possible solutions to the literacy crisis (some sympathetic to process pedagogy, some more product-oriented) were being supplied by developments in the relatively new and certainly vigorous social science of linguistics.
One such approach to linguistics, “tagmemics,” derived from the work of Kenneth Pike and his collaborators at the University of Michigan, Richard Young and Alton Becker.17 Tagmemics contributed in important ways to the process movement; indeed, Young, Becker, and Pike moved the field into invention, psychology, and cognitive science several years before Flower and Hayes began their own work. In their influential 1970 text Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, written even before the publication of Emig’s Composing Processes, Young, Becker, and Pike defined rhetoric “much more broadly than it had been defined for many years”; they declared that “[rhetoric] is concerned primarily with a creative process that includes all the choices a writer makes from his earliest tentative explorations of a problem in what has been called the ‘prewriting’ stage of the writing process, through choices in arrangement and strategy for a particular audience, to the final editing of the final draft” (xii). Working from Pike’s premise that linguistic action could be understood from the perspectives of particle, wave, and field, and from Young’s appropriation of John Dewey’s ideas on problem formation in Logic and Democracy and Education,18 the authors posed a set of heuristics for examining “units of experience,” a category which includes any person, object, or abstraction subject to thought. Much of their textbook consequently offered heuristics for prewriting and invention to help students to solve problems by preparing the mind to understand—and hence to come up with—good material for compositions. But Young, Becker, and Pike also described techniques for examining rhetorical situations (especially for realizing writing as a response to a problem), for editing drafts, and for analyzing texts in preparation for revision. These tactics without question shaped the work of Flower and Hayes and stimulated a great many other process advocates.
But though efforts to ground composition pedagogy and theory in tagmemics proliferated, and though aspects of tagmemic rhetoric reached the classroom through Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, through Flower’s 1981 textbook Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing, and through J. C. Mathes and Dwight Stevenson’s technical writing textbook Designing Technical Reports, these efforts never fully surpassed their marginal heuristic applications, possibly because, as Lester Faigley has observed, tagmemics to a degree “failed to account for a variety of distinctions that writers perceived among different texts” (Fragments 86). In other words, as a linguistic theory, tagmemics was proving to describe only incompletely the practices of actual speakers and writers. If composition theorists were seeking a model of language use that conformed to students’ actual experiences as language users (and which could thus suggest effective strategies for intervening in the writing process), then the analytical strength of linguistic approaches became a detriment when applied to the relatively unsystematic chaos of actual writing. The emergent discipline needed a more comprehensive