Play up Sex!

Well, it's not fair of me to highlight the straight from the Id comments from the professor in the protocol analysis from Flower and Hayes "play up sex" (p. 295), but I can't help it! It screams out at me. It also says how he imagines (or not) his discourse community. I've already had a little fun with it on Tanya's blog, so I'll try to tone in down here. I'll just mark it as an item of interest and do a dutiful job of trying to account for the Flower and Hayes article "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" (1981 CCC). This article must be read as part of a larger body of work produced by Flower and Hayes and also by Flower who wrote a much utilized textbook and also has newer work that incorporates work with a community literacy partnership. I'll dig up some links to the larger body of their work in another post.

First, off, let me comment that it is pretty quiet in the blogosphere right now. Is everyone battening down for the winter? Putting up storm windows, digging out those long lost snowboots and winter socks or rushing out to get the first ever pair? (I'm imagining Trish out there getting some boots)?

Tom, Autumn, and I squeezed in a birthday trip for him Friday and Saturday to Rochester, so we had a nice time there. Autumn also has a new winter coat--pink in contrast to all the blue ones I've selected for her in year's past. But that is another discourse community to be plumbed in another post....

Well, it's not quiet on Laura's blog where she has engaged in a call and response with Mina Shaughnessy. Check it out. Preach it!

As for Flower and Hayes, the first few pages are a useful overview of the composing process research up to 1981 (Britton; Moffett; Kinneavy; Odell, Cooper and Courts). Emig? Bitzer and Vatz are mentioned as those coming at questions of audience from a rhetorical perspective. They point out, though, that this research does not necessarily answer the question: "What guides the decisions that writers make as they write?" (273). They want to understand how writers negotiate that decision-making. "This paper will introduce a theory of the cognitive processes involved in composing in an effort to lay groundwork for more detailed study of thinking processes of writing" (274). They develop four key points in relation to setting forth a cognitive process theory model:

"1)The process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing

2) These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other.

3) The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process guided by the writer's own growing network of goals.

4) Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals which embody the wrtier's developing sense of purpose, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned in the act of writing" (275).

They go on to question further the "stage" models of the composing process and then elaborate in further detail (in some cases quite complex) how their model is a "major departure fromt the traditional paradigm of stages" (276). I won't belabor all the problems they find with the stage models, but their model is an improvement, in their words, because it considers the "thinking" that goes on in writing. They argue that writing has "three major elements": " the task environment, the writer's long-term memory, and the writing processes" (277). A diagram of the model can be reviewed on p. 278 of _Cross-Talk_.

A writing situation is always governed by a "rhetorical problem" (279). This is, essentially, the assigned writing task. In the case of the protocol analysis they feature, the task is an English professor being asked to write about his job to an audience of teenage girls who read _Seventeen_ magazine. His task is how to solve the problem of what to say to this audience.

In doing so, he has to draw on his long-term memory to figure out how to approach the topic. What does he know about teenage girls? What does he know about _Seventeen_ magazine? What can he say about his job that will be of interest to this group? How can he get their attention?

He begins planning, going back and forth between the rhetorical problem he faces and modifying his understanding of it. He generates ideas from long-term memory and begins to try to organize his long-term memories and set and reset his goals for the writing task. The goals he sets for himself are self-created. These goals are "generated, developed and revised by the same processes that generate and organize new ideas" (281). He tries to translate his ideas into symbols, he reviews and evaluates those ideas, and he monitors his process. In other words, the processes are not linear, we do not "march through these processes in a simple 1, 2, 3 order" (284). We move around in these thinking processes: "First, as our model of the writing process describes, the processes of generating and evaluating appear ot have the power to interrupt the writer's process at any point--and they frequently do. This means that new knowledge and/or some feature of the current text can interrupt the process at any time through the process of generating and evaluating. This allows a flexible collaboration among goals, knowledge, and texts" (289). This is a pretty dynamic model. It is epistemic, too: "In the act of writing, people regenerate or recreate their own goals in light of what they learn" (290).

The rest of the essay goes on to discuss the protocol of the professor composing an essay for his teenage audience. I've already talked about this on Tanya's blog, to some extent, but I do want to comment that the discussion/description of the cognitive process model dominates the article, and the protocol itself takes a backseat. The rhetorical choice to explain the model largely in isolation from the example or examples (I've actually cheated and tried to bring the two together) can be useful, but it has the effect here of making the protocol look like an after-thought, and there is a lot that is so interesting in this protocol: how the writer constructs an image and view of young girls, how he tries to think through how to represent his work, how he imagines _Seventeen_ magazine.

I can see how the model operates with and explains the professor's thinking processes, but what it does not account for are his cultural assumptions and biases that make it possible for him to address, or not, his audience. This is where Bizzell's article "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty" ((1982) comes into play as a useful corrective. I quote them at length: "The Flower-Hayes model consistently presents a description of how the writing process goes on as if it were capable of answering questions about why the writer makes certain choices in certain situations. While it is useful for us to have an overview of the 'how' such as the Flower-Hayes model offers, we should not suppose that this will enable us to advise students on difficult questions of practice. To put it another way, if we are going to see students as problem-solvers, we must also see them as problem-solvers situated in DISCOURSE COMMMUNITIES [my emphasis] that guide problem definition and the range of alternative solutions" (395). This explains some of the professor's struggles with trying to address the teen girls. He is struggling with how to frame his discourse for his audience; he is struggling with (and, I would argue, hampered by) gender-based assumptions. I'd like to see what he wrote, wouldn't you? (or maybe not)

The Flower-Hayes model is interesting to me--yes, interesting upon a distance of 25 years. The attempt to understand complex thinking processes in composing seems important, and later work on cognition bridges some of the gaps, accounting for some of the points I raise above and others such as culture, the environment, the role of emotions on cognition.

Yet "play up sex" (p. 295) remains one of the truly memorable lines in early composition protocol analysis. It is, unfortunately, all too familiar of a line. Play up sex to teenage girls (implied that it will get their interest), he says, and then the researcher notes "Yet it was instructive to note that once this new plan was represented in language--subjected to the acid test of prose--it too failed to pass, because it violated some of his tacit goals or criteria for an acceptable prose style" (295). How about this? HE SOUNDED A BIT LIKE A LECHEROUS IDIOT (PLAY UP SEX TO UNDERAGE MINORS), so he had a laugh at himself( we hope), and he skipped along to his next great idea.

Unfair, I know, but these moments need to be marked. The "model" takes care of the prof's remark (and the remark about girls liking English cuz its tidy) or does it?

My question: In addition to all this model allows for, how does protocol analysis (allow or not) and this model of cognitive process allow for assessment of cultural assumptions and biases?