Pre-Text and Composing

In this essay, I argue that writer's pre-text, or mental construction of text prior to transcription, is such an important composing phenomenon that theoretical and empirical research in writing must deal with it expressly.I As term is used here, pre-text refers to a writer's tentative linguistic representation of intended meaning, a trial locution that is produced in mind, stored in writer's memory, and sometimes manipulated mentally prior to being transcribed as written text. As mentally generated and stored trial locutions, pre-texts have both a semantic and a syntactic component, and they may take form of phrases, dependent clauses, sentences, or sentence sequences. Pre-texts differ, therefore, from all nonlinguistic representations of intended meaning such as nonverbal images and feelings (see Flower & Hayes, 1984; Flower et al., 1986). Pre-texts also differ from more abstract plans writers generate. What distinguishes a pre-text from an abstract plan is former's approximation to written prose. Unlike many plans, which can and do exist independently of linguistic structures, pre-texts are characterized by such structures. A pre-text represents, in effect, writer's attempt to instantiate abstract plans and goals in linguistic forms. 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 Flower and Hayes cognitive process model, pre-text may be associated 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.2 To some extent, present inquiry into nature and function of pretext during composing is motivated by previous inquiries into composing processes. For example, Flower & Hayes (1981) suggest possibility of something akin to what is here called pre-text when they observe that people revise written as well as unwritten thoughts and statements (374). In a sim-