Expressive
- The work of authentic voice
- Proponents: William Coles, Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Stuart
- The definition of ‘good writing includes the essential qualities of Romantic expressivism – integrity, spontaneity, and originality” (529). These qualities, then, “motivated a series of studies and theoretical statements on composing” (529).
Cognitive
- The research of those who analyze compositing process
- Proponents: Linda Flower, Barry Kroll, and Andrea Lunsford
- Calls for research on cognitive process were started by Janet Emig. She named the composing process as recursive (as opposed to linear) and provided the methodologies of case-studies and think-alouds.
- Cognitive theory was taken from James Britton – who argues that children have difficulty writing because he/she needs to imagine an audience (and, thereby, how their audience might respond) – and from American cognitive psychology – used by scholars like Flower and Hayes (532-3).
Social
- Content processes of writing are social in character instead of originating within individual writers
- Proponents: Patricia Bizzell, Kenneth Bruffee, Marilyn Cooper, Shirley Brice Heath, and James Riether
- The social view “rejects the assumption that writing is the act of private consciousness and that everything – readers, subjects, and texts – is ‘out there’ in the world. The focus of a social view of writing, therefore, is not on how the social situation influences the individual, but on how the individual is a constituent of culture” (535).
- Post-structuralist theories of language, which “brought notions of discourse communities to discussions of composing” (535)
- The sociology of science, which “examin[es] the social processes of writing in an academic community” (526). For instance, Bazerman argues that texts are not isolated and “autonomous presentations of faces; instead the texts are ‘active social tools in the complex interactions of a research community’” (536).
- Utilization of “the tradition of ethnography” as a methodology (536).
- Marist study of literacy, which asserts “that any acts of writing or of teaching writing must be understood within a structure of power related to modes of production” (537).
Faigley ends by arguing, “If the process movement is to continue to influence the teaching of writing and to supply alternatives to current-traditional pedagogy, it must take a broader conception of writing, one that understands writing processes are historically dynamic – not psychic states, cognitive routines, or neutral social relationships. This historical awareness would allow us to reinterpret and integrate each of the theoretical perspective I have outlined” (537).