My dialogue with Landmark Essays.

Composing process are so complex that it was necessary for scholars to break them down. Each researcher collaborated adding a different perspective to the phenomenon. I think this correlates with the switch that was observed in social sciences, when researchers stopped trying to define closed and neatly defined categories or units of analysis for the social sciences (based on natural sciences’ research model) and they started to assimilate reality as a highly complex construct, where each stance is valid to add to the effort of deciphering human activity. And as the process writing scholars stated, I am implicitly assuming that writing is before than any other thing that: a social activity.
I think that the alibis that writing process scholars faced in their research activities are similar to those faced by scholars in other fields or disciplines in the social sciences, such as psychology. Actually, many of them (i.e. Flower and Hayes, 1996) based their studies in psychological theories. What were these alibis? Well, the way I see it is that at the beginning they were so concern in defining clear-cut units of analysis and defining their object. Later, they turned to ethnographic or case-study methods, which opened a new world of research. Not as in tune as previous lab research was with “mother science” (the old scientific-method speaking here). Variables were controlled, concepts clearly defined, but where was reality? And this is what Pearl claims (p. xv) in her introduction to the Landmark Essays. The thing is, I think that all this was necessary. I guess that we, human beings, historically and ontologically, need to put reality in little neat boxes, classify it, in order to later being able to kick the boxes and discover the beauty that lies out there, in the real world.
I guess this goes along the lines of what I was reading in the last class session (chat modality) when my classmates were discussing process writing. Now, after opening the word file with part of the chat record in it, I can read their statements in a different way. Again: I recontextualized my classmates statements after reading the readings I could not read last week… and that’s the beauty of communication: it depends so much on context that it is so hard to grab it and brake it down in neat categories that help us, as writing teachers, to present it to students in a clear way. Personally, if I were asked to define “writing” I guess I would be blabling for a while and end up saying “you know what? I just can’t define it. Because what I enjoy about it, it’s that: the non-definition of writing is what makes it so desirable. Because there is always something more to want in what you never finish to get to know.
Furthermore, this unfinished characteristic of writing is what every writing researcher should be more aware than any other researcher, just by the mere fact that we have to recognize that at the time of communicating through writing our findings we are also in some way creating a reality, a science tale that can help or not others to figure out the process of writing. It sounds like a tongue twister, but when we write about the process of writing, how much of our writing intertwines with the way we conceptualize it? I think this goes along with what Pearl states about the “researcher’s shaping role” in scientific discourse (p. xix). As she states, after composing what they observed, “researchers find themselves faced with another composing task: fashioning what hey have come to see into a text that will convey their understanding to others”. What is left to ask, as usual, is how well I conveyed my understanding in this post.