ABSTRACT
In the first seven chapters, major trends in writing research and differing contexts for writing and writing instruction have been discussed. Together, these seven chapters provide the background for a reconsideration of the nature of writing, covering issues in textual structure, cognitive processing, and social contexts. In this chapter, we would like to step back and consider once again the basic question, ‘What is writing?’ This will be explored first through an ethnography of writing; then the various issues raised by the ethnography will be reconsidered through a taxonomy of writing skills and contexts; finally, a descriptive model of communicative language processing will be suggested as a means for integrating the cognitive, social and textual domains of a theory of writing.
