Their theory is guided by four hypotheses (366):
- The process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking process which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing.
- These processes have a hierarchical, highly embedded organization in which any given process can be embedded within any other.
- The act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer’s own ground network of goals.
- Writers create their own goals in two key ways: by generating both high-level goals and supporting sub-goals, and then, at times, by changing major goals or even establishing entirely new ones based on what has been learned.
There are three main components of the composing process model:
1. The task environment includes all of those things outside the writer’s skin, starting with the rhetorical problem or assignment and eventually including the growing text itself.
- The rhetorical problem must be defined by the writer and the writer’s goals are guided by how he/she understands the rhetorical problem (369).
- Each part of the text – each word, each sentence, each paragraph – constrains the next step that the writer can take (371).
2. The writer’s long term memory in which the writer has stored knowledge, not only of the topic, but of the audience and of various writing plans.
- “The problem with long term memory is, first of all, getting thinks out of it – that is, finding the cue that will let you retrieve a network of useful information. The second problem for a writer is usually reorganizing or adapting that information to fit the demands of the [current] rhetorical problem” (371).
3. Writing processes themselves, specifically the basic processes of Planning, Translating, and Reviewing, which are under the control of the Monitor.
- The planning stage is “an internal representation of the knowledge that will be used in writing.” (372). May not be represented in language. Planning has three sub-processes:
(2) organizing, during which the information is given structure in order to help the writer make meaning of the ideas”
(3) goal-setting, which can be “procedural” or “substantive” (372).
- Translation: “the process of putting ideas into visible language” (373).
- Reviewing, which “depends on two sub-processes: evaluating and revising” (374)
- “The monitor functions as a writing strategist which determines when the writer moves from one process to the next” (374).
The authors put a strong emphasis on the writer’s goal setting (specifically that the writer generates his/her own goals) and on writing as a process.
- “[T]he processes of generate and evaluate appear to have the power to interrupt the writer’s process at any point” (380).
- “In the act of writing, people regenerate or re-create their own goals in the light of what they learn” (381).
- Types of goal-setting
(2) State and develop: “the writer begins with a relatively general high-level goal which he then proceeds to develop or flesh our with sub-goals. As his goals become more fully specified, they form a bridge from his initial rather fuzzy intentions to actual text” (384)
(3) Write and regenerate: the writer writers and reconsiders goals in light of what he/she wrote (385)