What's audience got to do with it? Flower and Hayes's Cognition of Discovery

Flower and Hayes's piece represents a body of cognitive research about writing conducted in the 70s. While the discipline has recognized the problems of such research (for example, the think aloud protocol can be incomplete at best), studies such as "Cognition of Discovery" have no doubt provided a rich foundation for learning how to improve both writing and writing instruction.

For me, the main idea I take away from this article is that audience awareness is of great import if one is to become a successful writer--and by successful, I mean that the written text has its intended effect, whatever that entails. The expert writers recognized they had an audience that extended beyond the lab and researchers who assigned the writing task. They spent time considering what the audience would be interested in reading, how to present the topic to that audience, and how to style the text (including crafting a writerly voice) to match the audience's interests and needs. The novice writers gave little consideration to such matters.

This finding coincides with what I also have noticed during my teaching career. Often times, students think very narrowly about audience--the audience is the teacher and perhaps classmates. This is not necessarily the fault of the students, however. Most instructors, (English or otherwise, in middle school, high school, or college), rarely think about audience or exigence beyond the classroom when they assign papers. Instead, they design writing prompts which are intended to see how much a student knows about the course subject matter. But does that mean the student writer must then not think about the audience? I'd say not.

While it is always preferable to approach even fabricated classroom-based rhetorical situations as having potential audiences and exigence outside the classroom, we can write and write well in response to an assignment described above by inserting ourselves into the academic discourse of the discipline and participating as if we are equals to our professors and the scholars we have studied. In responding to writing prompts that cater to regurgitation of class content, we should strive to present our knowledge honestly. But we should also looks for ways to build on that knowledge, first by evaluating and then by asking questions of the content. Where do gaps or discrepencies exist in research and or information? What might these gaps and discrepencies mean? In doing this, we move ourselves out the realm of discovery-as-finding into the realm of discovery-as-creation, which is ultimately the idea Flower and Hayes used to structure and justify their study. Creating is a challenge, especially for an undergraduate who is still finding his/her way into the daunting world of academia. But it is a challenge I hope all students will meet head on.

On keeping a blog

I've never been one to keep a journal or diary. I'm not a "gushy feely" kind of person, and I rather pride myself on being self-unaware (a joke between my husband and myself). So to put my feelings on paper would feel a bit like a betrayal of self. But I have to admit, there is something very appealing about unleashing these bits of myself into cyberspace.

I have three academic blogs and one rather anonymous blog I keep for personal writing. Now, admittedly, I don't fill my personal blog with mush and gush. Rather, I use it to vent (about how wicked mean my aunts are to my mother) and to amuse myself and whoever else happens to find it. Having spent the last twenty years of my life writing academic papers, I have found it cathartic to be able to write about more shallow, less consequential things (such as how I think filesharing has transfered power from record executives to artists-where it should be--or how much I love the fact that it takes two hours longer to cook a Thanksgiving turkey in my house because my dad can't stop himself from opening the oven on the hour to inhale the heady aroma of roasting bird).

But perhaps more than anything, I am drawn to the potential audience of blogs--anonymous, bored, self-possessed surfers of the web. I often wonder about the search or series of clicks they followed to encounter my blog. Did I pop up under search results for Thanksgiving turkeys? Or has someone in a webring devoted to filesharing linked to an entry? The more I ponder these issues, the more I want to write, to reach out to those faceless readers who, sometimes, I've been able to connect with enough to compel them to comment on a post. And that, my readers, is a rather empowering thing, don't you think?