Problem-Solving Strategies and the Writing Process

IN THE MIDST of the composition renaissance, an odd fact stands out: our basic methods of teaching are the same ones English academics were using in the seventeenth century.' We still undertake to teach people to write primarily by dissecting and describing a completed piece of writing. The student is (a) exposed to the formal descriptive categories of rhetoric (modes of argumentdefinition, cause and effect, etc.-and modes of discourse-description, persuasion, etc.), (b) offered good examples (usually professional ones) and bad examples (usually his/her own) and (c) encouraged to absorb the features of a socially approved style, with emphasis on grammar and usage. We help our students analyze the product, but we leave the process of up to inspiration.2 Within the classroom, writing appears to be a set of rules and models for the correct arrangement of preexistent ideas. In contrast, outside of school, in private life and professions, is a highly goal-oriented, intellectual performance. It is both a strategic action and a thinking problem. But because as an act of thinking is messy and mysterious compared to the concrete reality of the product, we tend to leave composing up to the vagaries of chance and god-given talent to relegate it to independent warm-up exercises designated as pre-writing.' The inner, intellectual process of composing, the complex and