The Construction of Negotiated Meaning

Based on five years of close observation of students' writing and collaborative planning, cognitive rhetorician and composition researcher Linda Flower urges us to redefine writing as an interactive social and cognitive process and proposes a convincing and compelling theory of the construction of negotiated meaning.
Flower seeks to describe how writers construct meaning. Supported by the emerging body of social and cognitive research in rhetoric, education, and psychology, she portrays meaning making as a literate act and a constructive process. She challenges traditional definitions of literacy, adding to that concept the elements of social literate practices and personal literate acts. In Flower's view, this social cognitive process is a source of tension and conflict among the multiple forces that shape meaning: the social and cultural context, the demands of discourse, and the writer's own goals and knowledge.
With this conflict central to her theory of the construction of negotiated meaning, Flower examines negotiation as an alternative to the metaphors of reproduction and conversation. It is through negotiation, she argues, that social expectations, discourse conventions, and the writer's personal goals and knowledge become inner voices. The tension among these forces often creates the hidden logic behind student writing. In response to these conflicting voices, writers sometimes rise to the active negotiation of meaning, creating meaning in the interplay of alternatives, opportunities, and constraints.
To analyze negotiation, Flower first examines freshmen in the process of learning to work as collaborative planning partners and then conducts a classroom inquiry in which students use their collaborative sessions as the basis for self-observation and written reflection. Driven by their own questions and dilemmas, writers negotiate conflicting demands as they deal with their own goals, the voices of teachers present and past, personal and ideological assumptions about writing and authority, prompts from a partner, and their reading of the rhetorical situation.
Flower outlines a generative theory of conflict. For educators, acts of negotiation and reflection can reveal the hidden logic of the learner. From the learner's strategic knowledge comes the interplay of goals, strategies, and awareness. More important, an act of negotiation functions as a crucible of learning where social and personal transformation seems possible.

Linda Flower is a professor of rhetoric in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University and codirector of the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University.