ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 we identified ourselves with the view that writing is embedded in its social context. We expanded on what this means, distinguishing between ‘context of situation’ and ‘cultural context’, following Halliday (1985). One important element in the ‘context of situation’ for writing is the reader(s). Researchers in the past fifteen years have taken a lot of interest in the role of the reader(s) in shaping writing – see, for example, Britton and others (1975), Kroll (1984), Nystrand (1986) and Kirsch and Roen (1990). Current models of the writing process include ‘thinking about the reader’ as one element in the process, as we showed in Chapter 4. Books about the teaching of writing mention ‘considering the reader’ as important – see, for example, Byrne (1988), Hedge (1988), National Writing Project (1989) and Waters and Waters (1995).
