My first thought as I was reading through "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" was whether or not the writer whose process was transcribed in the article (383-385) was on drugs while writing. How did those thoughts ever turn into a coherent piece of writing? Does everyone think like that when they're just beginning to address a rhetorical problem? Have I been doing something wrong all this time, simply because my prewriting thoughts make logical sense? Maybe that's why I've never found prewriting all that useful. I like to talk to someone to generate ideas, but the ideas that I generate tend to come out in fully-formed, coherent sentences which can then be inserted without much extra thought into my essay/story/whatever.

That craziness aside, I have to say that I think this cognitive process theory of writing favors a particular type of student. A student like myself, actually. A student like many of us in this class. A student who already knows how to think and can juggle several writing tasks at the same time. "Common sense" tells us that these sort of skilled writers "are constantly planning (pre-writing) and revising (re-writing) as they compose (write)" (367). The problem, of course, is that most of my sophomores are not skilled writers. They don't necessarily even know what planning, revising, and composing mean, let alone what kind of work the various processes entail or how to perform said work. So while I might be fairly easily able to define a rhetorical problem and plan, translate, and revise my text all in the space of a single high school class period, most of my students would still be struggling to form a thesis statement at the end of their first paragraph as the bell was ringing.

I think that the stage model of writing must be relied on, to a certain extent, until writers have learned how to think and how to juggle the cognitive processes on their own. I think of the stage model as a kind of prompting. I would never suggest to a student that a pre-writing activity like word webbing is going to give him ALL the fodder he needs to write a paper, but I'm still going to ask him to do the word webbing so that he has SOME fodder to start arranging into an essay format.