Toward an Integrated Perspective of Writing as a Discourse Process

This chapter argues that theoretical models and research that focus on writing as a discourse process can help to integrate the different perspectives. Research on discourse processes inherently focuses on the cognitive and social processes underlying communication within broad cultural contexts. The chapter provides a brief overview of writing theories along with research conducted to support those theories. It presents ideas on how approaches to the study of writing can be enhanced by looking to research conducted on text comprehension as a discourse process. The chapter suggests that theoretical perspectives and research methodologies from the discourse processing community may provide a strong foundation on which to develop more robust theoretical models of the text production process. It also argues that research in these two areas can be synthesized to support more thorough theoretical perspectives on literacy and text-based communication more broadly.