The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

There is a venerable tradition in rhetoric and composition which sees the composing process as a series of decisions and choices.1 However, it is no longer easy simply to assert this position, unless you are prepared to answer a number of questions, the most pressing of which probably is: "What then are the criteria which govern that choice?" Or we could put it another way: "What guides the decisions writers make as they write?" In a recent survey of composition research, Odell, Cooper, and Courts noticed that some of the most thoughtful people in the field are giving us two reasonable but somewhat different answers:

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A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment

▪ Abstract Expert and exceptional performance are shown to be mediated by cognitive and perceptual-motor skills and by domain-specific physiological and anatomical adaptations. The highest levels of human performance in different domains can only be attained after around ten years of extended, daily amounts of deliberate practice activities. Laboratory analyses of expert performance in many domains such as chess, medicine, auditing, computer programming, bridge, physics, sports, typing, juggling, dance, and music reveal maximal adaptations of experts to domain-specific constraints. For example, acquired anticipatory skills circumvent general limits on reaction time, and distinctive memory skills allow a domain-specific expansion of working memory capacity to support planning, reasoning, and evaluation. Many of the mechanisms of superior expert performance serve the dual purpose of mediating experts' current performance and of allowing continued improvement of this performance in response to informative fe...

Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints.

Metaphors give shape to mysteries, and traditionally we have used the metaphor of discovery to describe the writer's creative process. Its broad meaning has sheltered many intellectual styles ranging from classical invention to modern heuristics such as tagmemics to self-exploratory modes such as Pre-Writing. Furthermore, discovery carries an implicit suggestion that, somewhere in the mind's recesses or in data outside the mind, there is something waiting to be discovered, and that writing is a way to bring that something out. However, if we try to use this metaphor to teach or analyze the creative process itself, we discover its limitations.1 First of all, because discovery emphasizes the rather glamorous experience of "Eureka, now I see it," it obscures the fact that writers don't find meanings, they make them. A writer in the act of discovery is hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself.2 Discovery, the event, and its product, new insights, are only the end result of a complicated intellectual process. And it is this process we need to understand more fully. There is a second, practical reason for teachers to probe this metaphor. The notion of discovery is surrounded by a mythology which, like the popular myth of romantic inspiration, can lead writers to self-defeating writing strategies. The myth of discovery implies a method, and this method is based on the premise that hidden stores of insight and ready-made ideas exist, buried in the mind of the writer, waiting only to be "discovered." Or they are to be found in books and data if only the enterprising researcher knows where to look. What does one do when a ready-made answer can't be found in external sources? The myth says, "look to your own experience." But what happens when a writer on this internal voyage of discovery still can't "find" something to say because his or her "ideas" as such are not actually formed? What is there to "discover" if only confused experience and conflicting per-

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The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem.

Writing Research and the Writer.

IF WRITING IS SIMPLY THE ACT of "expressing what you think" or "saying what you mean," why is writing often such a difficult thing to do? And why do papers that do express what the writer meant (to his or her own satisfaction) often fail to communicate the same meaning to a reader? Although we often equate writing with the straightforward act of "saying what we mean," the mental struggles writers go through and the misinterpretations readers still make suggest that we need a better model of this process. Modern communication theory and practical experience agree; writing prose that actually communicates what we mean to another person demands more than a simple act of self-expression. What communication theory does not tell us is how writers do it. An alternative to the "think it/say it" model is to say that effective writers do not simply express thought but transform it in certain complex but describable ways for the needs of a reader. Conversely, we may find that ineffective writers are indeed merely "expressing" themselves by offering up an unretouched and underprocessed version of their own thought. Writer-Based prose, the subject of this paper, is a description of this undertransformed mode of verbal expression. As both a style of writing and a style of thought, Writer-Based prose is natural and adequate for a writer writing to himself or herself. However, it is the source of some of the most common and pervasive problems in academic and professional writing. The symptoms can range from a mere missing referent or an underdeveloped idea to an unfocused and apparently pointless discussion. The symptoms are diverse but the source can often be traced to the writer's underlying strategy for composing and to his or her failure to transform private thought into a public, reader-based expression. In function, Writer-Based prose is a verbal expression written by a writer to himself and for himself. It is the record and the working of his own verbal thought. In its structure, Writer-Based prose reflects the associative, narrative path of the writer's

Linda Flower

Papers

A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing

The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem.

Writing Research and the Writer.

Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing.

Detection, Diagnosis, and the Strategies of Revision.