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#6 Hedge Maze Writing Process |
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| Very
soon after Gordon Rohman and others popularized the notion of a three-stage
composing process--pre-writing, writing, revising--its linearity was challenged
(e.g., Sondra Perl, "Understanding Composing," College Composition and
Communication31.4, 1980; and perhaps earlier in her 1978 dissertation,
Five
Writers Writing: Case Studies of the Composing Processes of Unskilled College
Writers). But picturing the recursivness of the way writers actually
compose was a challenge. Here Cathy D'Aoust appropriates, probably not
consciously, the concentric layout of an Italian hedge maze. Notice
the absence of arrows, which were de rigueur in cognitive information
flow-charts of the writing process (e.g., Linda Flower and John Hayes,
A
Process Model of Composition, Technical report No. 1, Pittsburgh, PA:
Carnegie-Mellon University, 1979).
D'Aoust's diagram comes from her piece, "Teaching Writing as a Process," in the 1987 California Writing Project's Practical Ideas for Teaching Writing as a Process (edited by Carol Booth Olson and published by the California Department of Education's Bureau of Publications). "Student writers do not simply move linearly from procedure to procedure," explains D'Aoust, "Their own recursive inner processes dictate the sequence" (p. 8). The figure will be found on the following page. RH, May 2003 |