A response to Flower and Hayes

          I found myself intrigued by the Flower and Hayes's article describing their cognitive model of writing. I find myself agreeing with their assertion that writing can better be described as types of thinking processes in contrast to the stage model that has been dominant in writing manuals.
             I myself do not follow the linear progression of prewrite, draft, and revise.  I do tend to assemble as much background information as I can, often organizing the data into meaningful categories by topic.  When I go to draft, however, I  may find myself stopping to find more data related to my topic or to prove my point. Thus pre-writing loses its before the fact character and is more of a recursive process. Similarly, I will often revise and edit as I am drafting.
              For example, I had an essay test a couple of nights ago in my seminar class with Dr. Hauss. I gathered my quotes in the way described above, but as I was drafting I found myself hunting for different quotes that I had missed in my preliminary preparation. This in turn resulted in significantly altering the flow of at least two paragraphs and the deletion of some sentences. I did not prepare the quotes, write the draft, and revise in a predictable order, but performed these activities almost simultaneously.
            When I do have my own writing classroom, I will have this model in mind when talking about the writing process. I am fairly certain that conceptualizing the writing task as ways of thinking as opposed to stages to be completed will be more useful to my students in the long run.