Flower/Haas

I thought this essay provided good food for thought. At its heart is the experiment Flower and Hass conducted with readers from across the spectrum -- experienced, doctorate students to college freshman. While reading a dense piece of writing, the subjects were asked what they were thinking at various points during their reading. The results showed that all of the readers’ (both advanced and novice) responses focused on content strategies. Many of the readers were unable to move past this strategy to create a deeper understanding of the text and the rhetorical situation that surrounds it. All levels of readers used function/feature strategies, but the readers that did use them used them to a much lesser extent than they used content strategies. Function/feature strategies focus on what the text is doing and offer a bit more insight into the rhetorical nature of the text.The final strategy noted by Haas and Flower’s, rhetorical strategy, is concerned with “constructing a rhetorical situation for the text, trying to account for the author’s purpose, context, and effect on the audience." Even though very few readers achieved this level of analysis, only the experienced readers exhibited these strategies in their reading responses. Tough stuff, but important to be aware of as teachers. With guided practice, we hope our students will learn how to identify an author’s purpose and write with their own purpose, identify an author’s audience and address the needs of different audiences and rhetorical situations in their own writing, etc.