ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature on flow in writing from multiple disciplinary perspectives that have historically informed the teaching of writing—composition, rhetoric, cognitive science, and linguistics. It presents the varied and, at times, vague perspectives on flow, which suggest that it is a rich, complex concept in need of a definition that brings together multiple perspectives and disciplines. The writer’s choices that influence the reader’s perception of flow can emerge organically through the creation of a whole—an approach that harks back to ancient rhetoric’s idea of unity and the later process of pedagogy. Flow can also emerge through the writer’s choices around sentence-to-sentence connections, connections within paragraphs, and connections across the entire work—choices which are typically described by the linguistics terminologies of cohesion and coherence. The chapter concludes that to teach flow effectively, instructors need a definition that brings together the distinct disciplinary perspectives and draws on linguistic knowledge of flow in writing; without such a definition, flow as a concept remains at once sought after by all and ill-defined, making it especially difficult to teach.
