ABSTRACT
In composition studies, [Ken] Bruffee, Patricia Bizzell, and others have questioned traditional notions about the autonomy of the author and traditional assumptions that writing and reading, in Bruffee‧s words, are “intrinsically individual, asocial activities.” They use the idea that writing takes place in social contexts to argue that the production of meaning in written language itself is a social or collaborative process. What goes through a writer‧s mind during composing—what the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1962) calls “inner speech”—is not the preparation of private and individual thought for public presentation. Rather, Bruffee argues, the writer‧s consciousness is constituted by public and social talk internalized, by conversation taking place within. In this view, the author is no longer the nineteenth-century individualist but rather a social function in a larger system of dependencies. Writing is not so much the personal expression (and property) of the individual author. Instead, Bruffee says, if “thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized.”
