Trying to Redefine the Task Environment as Part of the Process

Hayes and Flower include the task environment in the graph of their 1980 model, but its role for the cognitive process of writing it not discussed in the paper. Here, Molitor-Lübbert’s (1997) model adds a different view. It is based on the observation that professional academic writers spend their time switching between reading, thinking, and writing. She thus views the production of academic texts as cycles of knowledge acquisition, knowledge production, and knowledge communication. During the production of text, knowledge is developed in a continuous discussion between author, sources, and product. In this, reading plays one – if not the most – important role. Writing, in a more narrow

18 „Schreibforschung ist bis auf die Knochen repräsentationalistisch.“ (Ortner, 2000, p. 97)

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sense, subserves a variety of functions, ranging from archiving, different kinds of knowledge reproduction, to complex creative writing activities. Her model distinguishes four groups of processes: planning, production, reception, and evaluation processes.

1. Planning processes are the first steps towards making thoughts concrete and translating them into language. They serve to build a representation of the text intended.

2. Production processes serve to materialize these representations. They are encoded in order to be stored externally.

3. Reception processes are an automatic feedback loop for each production process (reading for control) as well as a focus in the context of text production in phases of knowledge acquisition. All forms of reading lead to a building-up of mental representations of what can actually be seen on paper or screen, to a representation of the text realized.

4. Evaluation processes serve to control action by comparing the text realized with the text intended or with the presumed intention of another author.

Molitor-Lübbert’s model (see figure 5) differs from the models discussed before insofar as it represents author (the author’s cognition) and medium (external storage) as equal partners in interaction.

Fig. 5: Flow of information in production strategies for academic texts (after Molitor-Lübbert, 1997, translation by me). The central graph contains all parts of the model and their relations. The grey fields with white text replace figures and the detailed models of the planning- and evaluation processes (p.58 and 60 respectively.)

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Thus, instead of being merely a constraint and therefore somewhat external to the cognitive process, the “text written so far”, as part of the task environment, is an integral part of the writing process.

This view allows for theorizing the role of the medium used for the writing process, including its cognitive dimension.

Figure 5 depicts the flow of information in production strategies for academic texts. The left processing strand, the planning and production processes, is controlled internally and aims towards the “outside”, at the materialization of thought into word (“Materialisierung vom Gedanken zum Wort”, p. 51). The right strand of the model, the reception and evaluation procesess, symbolizes the dematerialization from word to meaning (“Entmaterialisierung vom Wort zur Bedeutung”, p. 51).

Mental representations are the cognitively relevant and specifiable interface between “inside” and

“outside”. They emerge during information processing and mark intermediate states

(“Zwischenzustände”) in the flow of information. Both groups of processes are to be understood as in rank and change knowledge structures in head and medium. The processes are understood to be recursive, there is no specific order in carrying out the processes (p. 53).

While I value the interactive nature of the model, specifically the role ascribed to the task environment, I find Molitor-Lübbert's (1997) use of the concepts data, information and flow of information, knowledge, representation, and structures of meaning highly problematic. Molitor-Lübbert (1997, p. 49) claims that even without knowing about content and direction of these processes, what circulates again and again between head, paper, and/or screen is obviously

information¹⁹. According to her, the flow of information allows data, knowledge, and representations (the differences between these terms remain conceptually unclear) to be materialized inside and outside, e.g., as an addition to knowledge in memory or as text or file in an external medium. In reading and writing processes, these mentally represented meaning or knowledge structures may differ, since the “inner structures” may stem from a (diffuse) inner store (“Fundus”) which is subject to typical memory distortions like forgetting, distortion, or unconscious development, whereas external structures are not subject to unconscious, non-logical influences (1997, p. 55). Thus, despite the fact that she acknowledges differences between “internal” and “external representation”, the underlying idea is of a “transport” of data, or knowledge, or representations via the “flow of information” from the world into the mind and vice versa. In other words, the model works if one

19 Molitor-Lübbert does not give a definition of the notion of information she refers to. It seems to be a conceptual mixture of semantic information and Shannon information, taking “meaning” from the former and

“transferability” from the latter concept. An overview of notions of information and their (often not so explicit and clear-cut) use with regard to cognition can be found in Lyre (2002).

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accepts a (naïve) realist epistemology along with the idea that the world is represented in the mind in a structurally equivalent way (granting some distortions due to failure of wetware).

Here, writing research touches upon the old, yet unsettled debate on the role of representation in the relation between mind and world, which I will suspend for now and pick up in the second part of the thesis. For now, I will introduce Ortner’s perspective on the role of the “text so far” for the writing process. Like Molitor-Lübbert’s approach, Ortner considers the role of the “text written so far” – the artifact produced – In the process of writing, but does so in more depth.