Linda Flower

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Department of English

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Intercultural rhetoric is the study of literate practices that use cultural difference to build knowledge and support wise action. This paper documents the practice of a community think tank on urban workforce issues and examines the strategies used in this dialogue to 1) design an intercultural forum, 2) structure inquiry within diversity, and 3)...

This book examines the process of reading (when one’s purpose is to create a text of one’s own) and writing (which includes a response to the work of others). This is a central process in most college work and at the heart of critical literacy. The study observed students in the transition from high school to college, and in the process of trying t...

This chapter envisions a transformative rhetorical practice built on two separate roles for students within the communications or rhetorical classroom. As knowledge-negotiators, students are introduced to and build upon an environmental corpus through which they negotiate a spectrum of opinions on a range of problems. Simultaneously, they are requi...

Local publics open a distinctively generative space for deliberation, one that can actually use difference, based on race, status, or discourse, as a resource—but only if such marginalized perspectives can gain standing and be heard. For difference to gain a voice may depend on a discourse that can delay consensus, acknowledge conflict, and provoke...

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices-Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community-based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an eff...

This article reports our ongoing work in developing a model of health care communication called collaborative interpretation, which we define as a rhetorical practice that generates building blocks for a more complete and coherent diagnostic story and for a collaborative treatment plan. It does this by situating patients as problem-solvers. Our stu...

A study of how posing rival hypotheses--a cross-disciplinary practice of inquiry--is understood and taught across academic contexts: how teaching it altered student performance; and them how actively seeking out "rival hypotheses" or "rivaling can become a powerful strategy of intercultural dialogue in community literacy.

A chapter on a variety of planning/problem-solving strategies for writers, especially on exploring a rhetorical problem and the research-based process of collaborative planning.

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instruct...

Based on five years of close observation of students, writing and collaborative planning—the practice in which student writers take the roles of planner and supporter to help each other develop a more rhetorically sophisticated writing plan—foremost cognitive composition researcher Linda Flower redefines writing in terms of an interactive socia...

Writing instructors often assign collaborative writing activities as a way to foster reflective thinking; many assume that the very act of explaining and defending ideas in the presence of a responsive audience actually forces writers to take critical positions on their own ideas. This article questions this assumption by examining the role of crit...

A study explored the constructive, collaborative process of a group of writers under circumstances which throw light on dimensions of meaning making. The writers were college freshmen receiving "process instruction" and working collaboratively in a writing course. Collaborative planning is a loosely structured planning process in which the writer o...

This report summarizes research conducted under contract No. 00014- 85-K-0423 on the nature of planning processes in writing. Section 1 presents a general characterization of planning based on an integration of planning research in the fields of A. I., cognitive science, and writing. This characterization provides a framework for studying planning...

This book examines the process of reading (when one’s purpose is to create a text of one’s own) and writing (which includes a response to the work of others). This is a central process in most college work and at the heart of critical literacy. The study observed students in the transition from high school to college, and in the process of trying t...

This exploratory study investigates how writers represent their task to themselves before beginning to write. Using data from verbal protocols, we examine the initial plans of twelve writers (five experts and seven student writers) who were working on an expository writing task. The protocols were coded for types of planning. We also obtained indep...

This report examines the composing processes of expert writers to determine which cognitive processes in expository writing produce an opportunity for a creative response. The first section considers how the ill-defined nature of many writing problems and the cognitive processes experts use to solve these problems interact to provide an opportunity...

This paper explores some ways research can be used to create a more integrated theoretical understanding of the interaction between individual cognition and social/cultural context as the motive force in literate acts. Drawing on data from recent research on writing, the paper proposes three principles that inform a more complicated interaction and...

The task of teaching writing to students in business, engineering, design, computer science, accounting, and other professional areas raises the question of what knowledge the writers call upon to create a rhetorically effective writing plan. Research suggests three plausible answers: their knowledge of schemata, the structure of their topic knowle...

Reflecting new development in the field of rhetoric and composition, this textbook's third edition incorporates major changes which propose to turn theory into practical advice. These additions in the third edition draw on a new theoretical understanding of how writers operate within a discourse community, on a new research-based view of the revisi...

Planning in writing is a strategic response to both the writing situation and the writer's own knowledge. This paper describes the process adult writers bring to ill-defined, expository tasks, such as writing essays, articles, reports and proposals. In planning, writers draw on (nest and integrate) three executive level strategies: knowledge-driven...

A creative act is usually defined as one that has a valuable or interesting product and that is in some way original or surprising (Hayes, 1981). However, whether we characterize a particular act as “creative” clearly depends on the context or circumstances in which it takes place. For example, we evaluate the creativity of a child’s drawing using...

One way to build more adequate theories of both interpretation and composition is to explore the cognitive processes of readers and writers in the act of constructing a representation of meaning. This paper begins with a conceptual model in which readers and writers build private mental representations of meaning in response to both external forces...

Noting that the new literary and rhetorical theories are concerned with revealing the constructive nature of productive and interpretive processes, this paper examines the cognitive processes in reading and writing which make them constructive and intentional acts, and how reader and writer "negotiate" meaning in light of context, reader goals, and...

A review of research on the structure of writing processes shows that writing is goal directed, that goals are hierarchically organized, and that writers use 3 major processes—planning, sentence generation, and revision. The planning process is outlined in terms of the representation of knowledge, the source of the writing plan, and the use of stra...

This examination of an evaluation of writing based on process rather than on product argues that one of the primary functions of evaluation as a part of teaching should be to diagnose the writing strategies that underlie a writer's current performance, not just textual problems. The first half of the paper discusses the various ways teachers use ev...

The act of composing is best described as a set of distinguishable processes that interact. There are four methods for researching these processes: (1) behavior protocols, in which subjects are observed but are not asked to report their thought processes verbally; (2) directed reports, in which subjects are asked to explain how they performed a tas...

The three papers in this report set forth the research methodology and the theory used in one research project to identify the processes involved in writing. The first paper proposes a method, termed protocol analysis, for use in identifying the organization of writing processes. It defines protocol analysis as a means for examining the detailed se...

Two major factors have shaped writing research from the cognitive processing viewpoint. The first factor contains the strategic decisions about the course of such research, suggesting what is interesting and how best to proceed. The decisions made in regard to writing as a cognitive process have been to focus on the act of writing, to seek a proces...

This paper presents a tentative model of the writing process that has been developed according to the technique of protocol analysis. (A protocol is a description of the activities, ordered in time, in which a subject engages while performing a task.) The model identifies subprocesses of the composing process and their organization; minor variation...

While young children's problem-solving models are not as elaborate as those of older students, they share an important belief, namely, that writing and reading are fundamentally purposeful acts of communication. Focusing on the interpretation of process, in particular on writing and reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by communicati...