ABSTRACT
In the debate about approaches in writing research, the demand is often heard for one that allows writing to be seen and described as a social and collaborative process, rather than solely as an individual cognitive process (e.g., Barabas, 1990, Odell, 1985; see also Witte & Cherry, 1994). The dominant frame of analysis in the 1980s, represented by the problem-solving approach to study cognitive processes of individuals (Flower & Hayes, 1980, 1981; Hayes & Flower, 1980) considered the “world outside” the writer mainly from the point of view of the internal representations of this world the writer has built up and is building up while writing. Although this is valid from a cognitive-psychological point of view, it is not enough when one wants to describe what people actually are doing when they write in a non-instructional context (e.g., when they produce technical reports as part of their engineering work, or design an application form for student loans as part of their administrator’s job, or write a marketing brochure for a bank that brings new trust funds into the market). To discriminate between the two visions of writing without falling in the trap of drawing an artificial line between the social and the cognitive aspects of writing, I will reserve the term writing process for the actual text production of an individual writer, including of course the planning, idea generation reviewing one’s own text and revising that is part of text production. I will use the term document production process when the focus is on writing in an organization, in interaction with other actors involved, rather than as an individual, cognitive process.
