breakthroughs in cognitive psychology, other possible solutions to the literacy crisis (some sympathetic to process pedagogy, some more product-oriented) were being supplied by developments in the relatively new and certainly vigorous social science of linguistics.
One such approach to linguistics, “tagmemics,” derived from the work of Kenneth Pike and his collaborators at the University of Michigan, Richard Young and Alton Becker.17 Tagmemics contributed in important ways to the process movement; indeed, Young, Becker, and Pike moved the field into invention, psychology, and cognitive science several years before Flower and Hayes began their own work. In their influential 1970 text Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, written even before the publication of Emig’s Composing Processes, Young, Becker, and Pike defined rhetoric “much more broadly than it had been defined for many years”; they declared that “[rhetoric] is concerned primarily with a creative process that includes all the choices a writer makes from his earliest tentative explorations of a problem in what has been called the ‘prewriting’ stage of the writing process, through choices in arrangement and strategy for a particular audience, to the final editing of the final draft” (xii). Working from Pike’s premise that linguistic action could be understood from the perspectives of particle, wave, and field, and from Young’s appropriation of John Dewey’s ideas on problem formation in Logic and Democracy and Education,18 the authors posed a set of heuristics for examining “units of experience,” a category which includes any person, object, or abstraction subject to thought. Much of their textbook consequently offered heuristics for prewriting and invention to help students to solve problems by preparing the mind to understand—and hence to come up with—good material for compositions. But Young, Becker, and Pike also described techniques for examining rhetorical situations (especially for realizing writing as a response to a problem), for editing drafts, and for analyzing texts in preparation for revision. These tactics without question shaped the work of Flower and Hayes and stimulated a great many other process advocates.
But though efforts to ground composition pedagogy and theory in tagmemics proliferated, and though aspects of tagmemic rhetoric reached the classroom through Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, through Flower’s 1981 textbook Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing, and through J. C. Mathes and Dwight Stevenson’s technical writing textbook Designing Technical Reports, these efforts never fully surpassed their marginal heuristic applications, possibly because, as Lester Faigley has observed, tagmemics to a degree “failed to account for a variety of distinctions that writers perceived among different texts” (Fragments 86). In other words, as a linguistic theory, tagmemics was proving to describe only incompletely the practices of actual speakers and writers. If composition theorists were seeking a model of language use that conformed to students’ actual experiences as language users (and which could thus suggest effective strategies for intervening in the writing process), then the analytical strength of linguistic approaches became a detriment when applied to the relatively unsystematic chaos of actual writing. The emergent discipline needed a more comprehensive model to lean on.
This weakness of tagmemics, along with some of its successes, also characterized to a degree one other major linguistic approach to composition of the 1960s and 1970s, transformational-generative (TG) linguistics. In many respects, TG was even more limited than tagmemics in its value for composition and rhetoric in that it was attentive mostly to sentence-level considerations. However, during the 1970s, several rhetorical theorists and compositionists nevertheless aligned themselves with versions of this linguistic current. Several of them, most notably Ross Winterowd and Joseph Williams, sought ways to overcome the limitations of TG by crossing the “sentence boundary” into larger discursive forms, and by uniting it with a broader theory of rhetoric.19 Furthermore, its contribution to pedagogies like sentence combining and its fundamental role in informing the debates over “students’ right to their own language” in the early 1970s made it a significant contributor to new directions in composition.
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