ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents students’ perspectives on flow that emerged through coding quotations from a questionnaire administered to 166 first-year students attending four-year writing courses from two private colleges in the Northeastern United States. The chapter finds that students relate flow to a writer-centered organic process and to adherence to decontextualized advice in relation to structure (e.g., use topic sentences), information management (e.g., avoid repetition), and style (e.g., avoid passive voice). While students’ quotations do suggest that organization is linked to meaning, this typically involves the writer’s meaning rather than a concern with how readers make meaning from their texts. Additionally, students’ quotations suggest that they do not perceive flow through the lens of reader-based writing pedagogy strategies, specifically the work in genre studies and in functional and rhetorical grammar.
