Week 2

Carol Berkenkotter. “Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 388-399.

Using methods from Flower and Hayes, Berkenkotter examines how ten different teacher-writers consider audience while performing a specific writing task. Berkenkotter wonders if teacher-writers with formal training in academic writing think more about audience than writers who do not have such training. She thinks it is particularly beneficial that her study's participants come from a variety of different academic backgrounds: “five are professors of rhetoric and composition and have published in national professional journals; five teach and publish in other disciplines-urban history, computer science, metallurgy, science education, and anthropology” (pp 388). Further, Berkenkotter hypothesizes that while professors from rhetoric/composition constantly consider their audience while writing, professors from other content areas don't think as much about audience, because they are used to lecturing to a variety of listeners in the classroom and possibly think that their readership will be composed of a similar variety. Thus, she guesses, that an abstract audience is difficult to address; further, it may also be difficult to know what they want or need from a text if they're “all over the map.”

As a reader and newbie researcher, I immediately found Berkenkotter endearing when she expressed the inherent limitations to studying writers in a controlled experiment/setting: “the working conditions and environment are unnatural, the affective aspects of writing ignored, and only a small fraction of the writing process can be examined” (pp 389). I appreciate her transparency with regards to her study and its conditions. She also makes plain her intentions re: this controlled environment:

controlled laboratory writing situations […] force skilled writers to use large parts of their knowledge under pressure, knowledge that would be most likely drawn on automatically under naturalistic conditions. A protocol is, therefore, a rich source for information about some of what the writer is thinking as she is writing. At this time, it is the best research tool for teasing out the cognitive processes that reveal themselves in what we call audience awareness. (pp 389)

Think-aloud protocols as a method become really useful in this experiment because they allow the researcher to get a holistic and clear sense of the processes the teacher-writers go through and the decisions they make while writing. Even the self-editing choices become interesting when the teacher-writers reflect on why they made such choices. It's as close to getting the real, juicy “behind the scenes” details as one can get, even if it's controlled, as Berkenkotter wants her participants to engage as organically as possible. When Berkenkotter asks these groups “to think aloud as they composed, [she keeps] track of when and how frequently the questions about audience enter each writer's mind, and to what extent audience-related considerations guided their rhetorical, organizational, and stylistic decisions” (pp 389).

Upon compiling her data, Berkenkotter realized that the teacher-writers made interesting decisions about audience depending on how they saw themselves conducting the task at hand and what the purpose of the task was: “Writers who wrote to persuade thought aloud about their audience four times more often and in twice as many ways as those who narrated personal histories. Writers who opted to inform fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum” (pp 393). In addition, issues of tone, discourse, and intentionality played a role in decisions about audience and anxieties about how the audience would receive the information. (And I should make a point to clarify something interesting here: Even though those who chose to narrate their personal histories considered their audience less often, Berkenkotter still acknowledges that according to their protocols, they still thought about how their audiences would interpret their text; they just did so closer to the start of their planning instead of throughout their writing activity.)

I find compelling Berkenkotter's conclusions about how different Discourses also play a role in the participants' decision-making: there were several participants who came from the rhetoric/composition field, but the rest came from a variety of academic fields, and, depending on which category they fell into, they interpreted Berkenkotter's directions differently, which is interesting. Going back to her hypothesis, the composition professors were not exactly thorough and did not feel compelled to produce a draft of their text; they, therefore, were not as “self-conscious about the composing process” (pp 395). How did confidence about writing or a lack thereof play a role in making decisions about audience? Berkenkotter does not say. However, she does decide, in her Summary section, that a re-working of her research question is in order, given the results she gathered:

If I reframe the question as follows: what ways of thinking about audience do writers from different disciplines share, I see two significant patterns. First, although each of the ten subjects handled the question of audience differently, all formed a rich representation of the audience; this representation played a significant role in the development of the writer's goals. Second, most subjects created individual rhetorical contexts or scenarios. I suspect that the writers in my sample felt freer to invent context because, unlike the subjects in the Flower/Hayes group, they were not asked to write for a specific genre... The ability to create context has an important heuristic function... (pp 395)

This re-situating of the study is valuable because it allows us to see that all teacher-writers, regardless of discipline and training, consider their audience important, particularly when they feel free to share from their expertise in particular. When the teacher-writers are asked to connect with their audience in tangible ways, they are able to, as one of the participants said, “speak the language of [their] audience.” In summary, this becomes a matter not of failing to connect depending on training but instead a matter of how often and why. I think these are important lessons to consider regardless of who the writer may be (teacher, student, businessperson, etc), because all of us are always writing with the goal to connect.

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Stephen P. Witte. “Pre-Text and Composing.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 397-425.

Before beginning this review, some definitions are in order: Witte uses the term “pre-text” to mean the thought process and planning that writers go through before they actually sit down to compose. He starts the article by expressing the need in the field for researchers to continue to study the relationship between “pre-text” and writing. Therefore, pre-texts, according to Witte (who is also drawing from Flower and Hayes), are not simplistic: they are deliberative and constructive, the invisible yet important scaffolding processes a writer experiences before even the pre-writing stage of composition:

Thus distinguished from abstract plans and goals, pre-texts represent critical points along a continuum of composing activities between planning and transcribing written text. In terms of the Flower and Hayes cognitive process model, pre-text may be asso-ciated with planning, and it may be associated with translating, "the process of putting ideas into visible language" (Flower & Hayes, 1981, 373), even though a pre-text is not yet visible on paper (pp 397)

Now that some of these distinctions have been made, Witte gets down to business: Because all of the writers he has informally spoken with all have pre-text processes in common, he feels that there should be no question that they are worth our attention and seriousness. Further, this phenomenon is worth researching because “the most readily accessible data on pre-text, personal experience and the testimony of writers, afford very little insight into its nature and function during composing” (pp 398). Because it exists as invisible thought processes, however, Witte notes that studying this phenomenon will always be difficult; though the effects end up being tangible, while a writer is in the “pre-text” stage, his or her processes are completely abstract to outside observers. Therefore, “at the present, the best available means of studying pre-text, its creation, and its functions during composing is through indirect observation afforded by thinking-aloud protocols” (pp 399).

Witte confesses that employing think-aloud protocols in order to study pre-texts can be potentially seen as problematic, however. Think-aloud protocols may assume that there isn't a distinction between thinking abstractly about a plan and articulating said plan. He also states that observers may not be able to tell whether something is pre-text or just explanation: he wonders, is the difference between the think-aloud and the pre-text simply an issue of semantics? “[Another] objection could be based on the belief that thinking-aloud protocols encourage writers to produce more complete or better-formed pre-texts than they would if they were not simultaneously thinking aloud as they wrote” (pp 399). However, Witte ultimately concludes that most of these objections are not “convincing,” although matters concerning the ability to create “better” pre-texts given the unnatural setting of the think-aloud does warrant some concern. He states that in the end, because pre-texts are innate writing processes, it's impossible to tell whether think-alouds as a method help or hinder their productivity and measurability.

With all of the disclaimers and caveats out of the way, Witte explains and legitimizes his methods and describes his study and sample:

The thinking-aloud protocols used as data are drawn from a group of over fifty collected from college-level writers, mostly freshmen.4 As preparation for doing thinking-aloud protocols as they wrote essays, each student was given a "matchstick" problem or a similar problem to solve as he/she produced a "practice" thinking-aloud protocol. Subsequently, students were given a writing assignment. After reading a particular assignment, each student was to write an essay and to "say aloud everything that comes into your mind as you write." (pp 400)

In order to prevent himself from making sweeping generalizations about his data, Witte does a fine job of refining his argument to just be about some, not all, writers and their process. That said, he observed that those who do demonstrate pre-text definitely use such a practice to influence/direct/shape their writing. The examples from the students' think-alouds show that the pre-texts allow for recursive and thoughtful writing practices: For instance, one student, Pat, revises her thesis several times during the pre-text stage before even writing it down, and during the process of writing it down, parts of her thesis that give her pause are reshaped a third and forth time. Thus, “Pat's protocol provides compelling evidence that a writer's mentally stored and unwritten pre-text can affect immediately and directly a writer's written text and a writer's subsequent revisions of the written text” (pp 402).

Witte makes other interesting observations of his students and their think-alouds, including that they seem to store their pre-texts in such a way as to make them easily-accessible throughout the entire writing activity. Often, they lend themselves to self-editing/revising practices, even before pen and paper are used. In addition, “when revision of pre-text and written text occurs simultaneously, the contribution of a writer's pre-text to his/her mental representation of intended meaning may be the probable cause of the revision of written text” (pp 404). Overall, the data that Witte collected, and his interpretations of the data, are rich and invite further study. Pre-text is a complex and interesting phenomenon that affects many writers and their practices. The variety of pre-texts shown by the students in this study alone forces us to recognize that although the line between pre-text and composing is blurry, a lot of fruitful activity occurs at that border. In fact, instead of seeing such a line as a border, it's helpful to think of it as an intersection that permits writers to compose freely. In Witte's words, “How one distinguishes between planning and translating is, of course, a theoretical question... Nevertheless, it is [...] a theoretical question of considerable importance, because at the level of theory, distinctions between planning and translating affect the range and kinds of questions one chooses to ask about the nature of composing” (pp 418).