Drafting Differences

Starting with the last article first...I have some fairly strong agreements and disagreements with Flowers and Hayes' argument for a cognitive process of writing. I agree wholeheartedly that writing is, in part, an intellectual process. To think that writing "just happens", and that it doesn't run through multiple processes of the mind is absurd. My disagreements lie with, and this is totally a worldview/personality difference, the insistence for charts and discussion of hierarchies of goals and that ilk. I guess then, my issue lies more with the need to overthink what I see as a natural process. Granted, it obviously is a learned process, but I see the potential to write as a latent, natural process, that requires teaching only to give form to the process.

I really enjoyed the Harris article, and the resulting discussion for the matter, on one-and-multi draft writers. Honestly, before dealing with this article, I had always considered one-draft writers simply lazy or procrastinators. And while I still don't know that I myself will ever be a one-draft writer, I can understand where they are coming from now. It was also neat to see practical application of previous readings for class in this one. I had struggled some with the reader versus writer based prose, and this helped me to better understand how the focus of writing can be influenced by audience.

The information discussed in Sommer's article about revision...mostly wasn't new to me, but I do feel like I benefitted from gaining an understanding of the format of the types of articles that I may someday write and publish in scholarly journals.