ABSTRACT
Discussing notions of audience in socially oriented analyses of writing, Phelps (1990) observes that writing researchers and theorists have continued to be caught up in “the textual and the psychologized rhetorics where abstractions like the fictive audience (textual representation) and the cognitive audience (mental representation) are more salient than the actual exchanges of talk and text by which people more or less publicly draft and negotiate textual meanings” (p. 158). As writing research moved out of the laboratory to explore such exchanges of talk and text in naturalistic settings, it ran up against its own assumptive frameworks at a key interface between theory and methodology: the formation and representation of the object of study itself. As Brandt (1990; see also chap. 1 ) argued, researchers have often fixated on material texts rather than human activity in defining the nature of literacy. Witte (1985) noted a similar fixation in writing process research. His notion of pre-textual revision, in effect, questioned the whole edifice of objects of study that process researchers (e.g., Flower & Hayes, 1981) had erected around focal acts of transcription and the focal artifacts of texts. Witte (1992) extended his critique to studies of situated writing, arguing that historical streams of semiosis could not be arbitrarily fenced in by an a priori privileging of linguistic-textual artifacts and transcriptional processes.
