Networked Process. Helen Foster
to writer, that they cannot be reduced to a pat formula but demand models of great breadth and flexibility” (294). Kostelnick, on the other hand, says that writing process parallels design process. He further argues that a comparison of the two underscores the importance of building models that would account for the full spectrum of the writing taught and researched. Both scholars, however, attest to the complexity of writing process and articulate a broader spectrum of possibility that suggests student heterogeneity.
Both D. Gordon Rohman and Erika Lindemann also implicitly reject a homogeneous notion of the subject. They speak to the need for writing process theory to include notions of situatedness as well as flexibility. Rohman, for example, says that writing is usefully conceptualized as a process, “something which shows continuous change in time like growth in organic nature” (106). The analogy of writing process to organic nature suggests that the student-subject is the logical antecedent to process. Just as notions of writing should not be static, he argues, neither should notions of the student-subject for which those notions are formulated. Lindemann is even more specific in her support for a heterogeneously conceived notion of writing process: “writing involves not just one process but several. [. . .] Also, the processes change depending on our age, our experiences as writers, and the kind of writing we do. Indeed, they seem as complex and varied as the people who use them” (21). Lindemann therefore describes a highly rhetorical conception of writing process, as heterogeneous as those who use it.
Still other scholars offer new conceptualizations of writing process, or they discuss those they believe to have been overemphasized or neglected in the past. Lee Odell, for example, recommends that we could best help students by identifying the intellectual processes reflected in their writing. Linda Flower and John Hayes provide the ground for further research on the thinking processes involved in writing. Barry Kroll recommends a “cognitive-developmental” theoretical approach to composing, which draws upon the psychology of Jean Piaget and the educational psychology of John Dewey. He argues for an emphasis on writing as process because, he says, it could provide students with strategies to manage their writing that would not oversimplify their process.
Although George Jensen and John DiTiberio argue that C. G. Jung’s system of identifying different personality types would benefit both composition instruction and composition research, they also acknowledge that different people use different processes. This observation suggests that what was most needed was a better understanding of how people differ and how these differences affect writing process. Personality, then, was the element they believe had been neglected. C. H. Knoblauch takes issue with a perceived overemphasis on the textual aspects of writing choices, and he insists that behavioral aspects are worthy of teaching scholarship. We should, he argues, ask questions about the correlation of writing choices to both the kind of task attempted and to the competence of a specific writer. When these questions are answered we better understand how to develop advantageous behaviors in the classroom.
Jack Selzer, however, believes composing habits do differ among writers, but he does not believe these differences inhered within a writer. Carol Berkenkotter maintains that changes in aim, an element she contends is overlooked, also changes the composing habits of experienced writers. Sondra Perl, however, argues that parts of the writing process cause changes not only from writer to writer but also from topic to topic (“Composing Processes”). It is an overemphasis on the rationalization of composing that Richard Young maintains was the “great danger of a technical theory of art—of art as grammar” (201). Patricia Conners argues that our research ought to focus on intuition and intuition ought then to inform our teaching practice. “A persistence in viewing intuition and the whole problem-solving process of writing as inexplicable and mysterious,” she says, “is a little like insisting the world is flat—no true wonder is lost in a more accurate understanding” (77). Alice Brand identifies affective elements as the overlooked element in what she contended was a concentration of scholarship on the cognitive aspects of writing. “Understanding the collaboration of emotion and cognition in writing,” she maintains, “is both fundamental and far-reaching. It is in cognition that ideas make sense. But it is in emotion that this sense finds value” (442). Finally, Susan McLeod justified the need for scholarship of the affective: “we can help with strategic self-management in the affective as well as in the cognitive domain” (433).
This profile of process recognizes a wide array of scholarship: the recommendation to study intellectual processes; the critique of an overemphasis on cognition and rationality; the call for a theory of the affective; the recognition of the role of intuition, the argument that we should study behavior; the nomination of Jungian psychology to ascertain personality types; and the cognitive-developmental theory drawn from Piaget and Dewey. In addition, process theorists have suggested that aim changes the composing habits of experienced writers, that topic changes the composing process of the writer, and that composing habits differ among writers but not within a writer. While this sampling of scholarly opinions is broad, it represents only a scant portion of the total scholarship that speaks in some way to writing process. Nevertheless, it helps to capture a panoramic view of writing process as both discourse and practice
Process, Post-Process: A Point of Stasis
Regarding the nature of academic debates, Ralph Cintron writes that they “are to a significant degree performances. Differences—and they do exist—push themselves forward by creating caricatures of each other. Although it may seem paradoxical, differences are deeply relational: To denounce the other’s position is to announce one’s own” (376). We know that process caricatured current-traditional rhetoric to create a space for itself and we also understand something of the costs of that move. Post-process appears now to harbor a similar impulse. Indeed, Paul Kei Matsuda writes that
while Kent is careful to note the divergence of perspectives among proponents of post-process theory, the term ‘post-process’ seems to be used in his volume as a way of solidifying disparate critiques of so-called expressive and cognitive theories and pedagogies. That is, post-process [. . .] seems to be on its way to constructing its own narrative of transformation with process as the necessary caricature. (74)
As Lad Tobin writes in the 1994 collection Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the ’90s, “recent reports of the death of the writing process movement have been greatly exaggerated” (9). Paradigm hope may thrive, but we know only too well from our own history, and our understanding of what Paul Feyerabend has to say on the utopian yearning for paradigms and paradigm shifts, that no such possibility exists. A shift may, indeed, be occurring, but is it a relational one.10 There is every reason to assume, then, that a point of stasis, representing some shared value, can be articulated and can lead to a productive and mutually enriching dialogue.
The process profile reveals a panoply of perspectives, each of which can be viewed as enlarging the knowledge domain of the discursive formation that writing process was and is. Some statements speak to institutionalization, some to the nature of writing, some to aspects of writing process, some to how writing process should be taught, and some to the process an individual student-subject uses to produce writing. It is important to recall that these discussions were stimulated by frustrations with the current-traditional approach that hardly considered the individual student-subject.11 Thus, the individual student-subject began to receive attention in the context of the questioning of the nature of writing and the best pedagogy for writing. Admittedly, some who rejected the current-traditional approach made the individual student paramount even going so far to evoke the image of a lone genius. This position, along with that of current-traditional, established the ends of a continuum in which the discourse of writing became situated. The composite constitutes the unity of a discursive formation that would lead to its institutionalization. Writing process, or simply “process,” has functioned as a disciplinary metaphor for this discursive formation.
“Process,” as a disciplinary metaphor, became strained, however, with the advent of social/cultural scholarship in the 1980s, when writing process was submitted not only to further (re)formulations but also to the more stringent critiques associated with these reformulations (see Berlin, Bizzell, and Faigley). The social/cultural turn did constitute a significant shift in rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary discursive formation. However, not only was there no break with process during this period, there was also never a serious suggestion