5. Contextual Applicability of Theories and Visualizations
Lester Faigley begins his article “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” by outlining the three main theories of writing process: the expressive view, the cognitive view, and the social view. Faigley explains that the expressive process of writing favors “integrity, spontaneity, and originality” (529) and “does not follow rules but reflects the processes of the creative imagination” (530); expressive writing, then, is an organic journey that results from the spontaneous imaginative processes of the writer. The cognitive view focuses on explaining writers’ decision-making throughout writing processes. The social view assumes that “human language (including writing) can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual” (535); this view focuses on how the social context of the discourse affects the individual’s writing. It is clear that these three views of the writing process have very different goals in understanding writing.
To conclude his article and to summarize his main argument of this article, Faigley says, “If the teaching of writing is to reach disciplinary status, it will be achieved through recognition that writing processes are, as Stanley Fish says of linguistic knowledge, ‘contextual rather than abstract, local rather than general, dynamic rather than invariant’” (438). I absolutely agree with the argument that theories of writing processes must be applied according to the context of the discourse. I am convinced that exclusively encouraging one theory of the writing process over another severely restricts the success of our composition instruction. All of us can attest to the fact that no two students learn the same way or write using the same processes; favoring one process over another diminishes the value of the myriad methods we have all found in producing successful pieces of writing. Like Faigley, I think we should instead apply various theories of the writing process to appropriate contexts of writing; our writing process should be dictated by the rhetorical situation of the discourse.
Just as we should apply theories of writing process to various appropriate rhetorical situations, I argue that visualizations of professional writing activities should also focus on specific contextual applications rather than applicablity in all rhetorical situations. In their article “Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges and Opportunities,” William Hart-Davidson, Clay Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachry identify six characteristics of successful writing practice visualizations: data driven, represented by explicit but flexible categories, interactive, portable, timely, and able to answer key questions (75). I agree that each of these criterion contributed to an effective visualization of writing activities, but I argue that the last criterion is more important than the others. An effective writing activity visualization should be “able to be extended and configured to become contextual beyond the point of being simply domain-aware, up to and including being personalized for an individual’s unique reasoning needs” (75). Just as Faigley argues that we should apply different theories of writing processes to different rhetorical situation, so too must visualizations of writing processes also apply to various rhetorical situations. The key to both a theory of writing process and visualizations of writing activities is applicability to various rhetorical situations. If either of these is too specific (like the three theories of writing process outlined in Faigley’s article) or too general, growth in the field will inevitably be limited.
Works Cited
Faigley, Lester. “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” College English 48.6. (1986): 527-542. PDF.
Hart-Davidson, William, Clay Spinuzzi, and Mark Zachry. “Visualizing Writing Activity as Knowledge Work: Challenges & Opportunities.” ACM SIGDOC. (2006): 70-77. PDF.