She details that “an ecology of writing encompasses much more than individual writer and her immediate context. An ecologist explores how writers interact to form systems: all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the systems” (368). She then highlights the systems within which writers connect:
- “The system of ideas is the means by which writers comprehend their world, to turn individual experiences and observations into knowledge” (369).
- “The system of purposes is the means by which writers coordinate their actions” (369).
- “The system of interpersonal interactions is the means by which writers regulate their access to one another. Two determinates of the nature of a writer’s interactions with others are intimacy, a measure of closeness based on any similarity seen to be relevant – kinship, religion, occupation; and power, a measure of the degree to which a writer can control that actions of others” (369).
- “The system of cultural norms is the means by which writers structure the larger groups of which they are members. One always writes out of a group” (370).
- “The system of textual forms is, obviously, the means by which writers communicate…A textual form is a balancing act: conventional enough to be comprehensible and flexible enough to serve the changing purposes of writing. Thus, new forms usually arise by a kind of cross-breeding, or by analogy, as older forms are taken apart and recombined in a wholesale fashion” (370).