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A Social-Interactive Model of Writing

Article  in  Written Communication · January 1989

DOI: 10.1177/0741088389006001005

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 A SOCIAL-INTERACTIVE MODEL OF WRITING

MARTIN NYSTRAND

Department of English
The University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nystrand, M. A social-interactive model of writing. W ritten Communication, 6(1), 66-85 .

 A SOCIAL-INTERACTIVE MODEL OF WRITING1

Martin Nystrand

Abstract

In this decade, writing researchers have shown increasing interest in the social
aspects of written communication. This interest has largely been stimulated by
interest in writing-across-the-curriculum programs, peer conferencing, and dialogue
journal keeping, as well as such pressing issues as the relationship of process to text,
the relationship of process to the social contexts of writing, and the problem of genre.
This article outlines a social-interactive model of written communication,
highlighting the writer's role in negotiations with readers in the medium of text.
Formalist theories of text meaning (meaning is in the text) and idealist theories of
meaning (meaning in the reader) are reviewed and challenged. In social-interactive
theories of discourse, which are proposed as an alternative to formalist and idealist
theories, meaning is said to be a social construct negotiated by writer and reader
through the medium of text, which uniquely configures their respective purposes. In
the process of communicating, writers and readers may be said to make various
"moves," which achieve progressive and sequential "states" of understanding between
them. Writers make three essential kinds of moves: they (1) initiate and (2) sustain
written discourse, which they accomplish by means of (3) text elaboration. The rules
for writer's moves are spelled out in a fundamental axiom and seven corollaries.

1
The author thanks John Knapp for his insightful comments concerning an earlier
draft of this paper, which was prepared with support from the National Center on
Effective Secondary Schools, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, School of
Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is supported in part by a grant
from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (Grant No. G-
008690007). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed
in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of this agency or the U. S. Department of Education.
 A SOCIAL-INTERACTIVE MODEL OF WRITING

Every utterance is oriented on intercourse, on the hearer, on the reader, in a

word, on another person, on social intercourse of any kind whatever (Bakhtin,
1985, pp. 93-94).

If the 1970s were the decade that discovered the composing process, the 1980s
are the decade that has discovered the important role of social context in the
composing process. In short, there has been a shift in perspective from things
cognitive to things social. This shift has arguably been brought about by the new role
writing has come to play in American colleges and universities. As Bizzell (1986)
notes, writing became a respectable object for serious academic inquiry in the 1970s
partly in response to the needs of composition faculty to achieve legitimacy in
departments of English and partly because of their pressing needs to understand the
dimensions of the literacy problems brought on by open admissions in the late '60s
and early '70s. Among the most important objectives of the new writing scholars and
researchers was their dissociation from a prescriptiveness focused on good texts espoused
by earlier writing teachers, and alternatively, their commitment to an objective and
systematic description of composing . The new researchers' eagerness to supercede
pedagogues' prescriptive concerns about exemplary texts and engage in accurate
descriptions of ordinary writing echoed an analogous struggle among students of
language earlier in the twentieth century, viz. linguists' wrenching control of the
study of language from philologists in establishing speech and not writing as the
principal domain of linguistics.

I. On the Emergence of Social Perspectives in Composition Theory

A. External Forces

In the 1980s, two additional forces have influenced writing researchers, one
external to the research community and the other internal. Externally, as Faigley
(1986) notes, professional concern for writing has transcended college and university
departments of English and writing programs in the guise of writing across the
curriculum. Writing faculty now face issues related not merely to the monistic
humanities essay of English 101 but also the many genres that constitute the diverse
and pluralistic universe of discourse characteristic of colleges and universities. This,
in turn, has made problems of text and genre more salient and interesting to writing
researchers, who, in the wake of Emig (1971), had been interested almost exclusively
in the composing process in some generic sense. Researchers (e.g., Williams, in
press) have noted, moreover, that the novice-expert distinctions that Flower and
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 67
Martin Nystrand

Hayes (1980a) make, for example, are not categorical but vary from field to field as
individuals enter new fields. Hence, writing differentiates not once and for all as
novice freshmen-writers become expert senior essay-writers, but rather and
repeatedly each time individuals accommodate themselves to the modes of discourse
characteristic of the new fields they choose to enter. Other researchers have
documented a comparable phenomenon in writing in nonacademic settings (e.g.,
Odell and Goswami, 1982). All these new studies have heightened researchers'
awareness of social aspects of writing.

B. Internal Forces

In addition to these external forces, discussions within the community of writing

researchers have raised issues related to once prevailing cognitive approaches to
writing.
1. Beyond Plans and Goals. Beginning in the mid-seventies, as composition
instructors and researchers struggled to establish the composing process and not
exemplary texts as the appropriate focus for instruction and research, authorial intent
(also known as writer purpose, plans, and goals) was widely hailed as the appropriate
first principle of enlightened praxis and investigation. From this point of view, it is
writer purpose which energizes the system and gives shape to the emerging text. In
this decade, however, writing instructors and researchers have broadened their focus
to consider such other issues as (a) the relationship of process to text, (b) the
relationship of process to the social contexts of composing, and (c) the problem of
genre of written text produced in various academic departments. As it has done so,
attention to writer purpose has been supplemented by (a) explications of context
(e.g., Brandt, 1986; Nystrand, 1983), b) relationships of writing to reading (e.g.,
Bazerman, 1980; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1984; Kucer, 1987; Nystrand, 1986;
Tierney and LaZansky, 1980; Tierney, Leys, and Rogers, 1984), and (c) the
relationship of writers to their discourse communities (e.g., Bizzell, 1982; Brodkey,
1987; Bruffee, 1986; Faigley, 1985).
This is not to say that the field has decided that writer purpose is irrelevant or
unessential; rather, it is to note that writer purpose, as Stanley Fish (1980) likes to
argues, is never not central. That is, because all language use and production is
comparably purposeful — simply because it is discourse — speaker/writer purpose is
inadequate for distinguishing either (a) various genres of writing from each other or
indeed (b) writing from other modes of discourse (including writing vs. speaking; and
writing vs. reading; cf. Nystrand, 1986). Also, while purpose is invariant as a factor
in language production and use, it does not provide an adequately specific online
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 68
Martin Nystrand

principle (cf. Witte and Cherry, 1986) accounting for the microgenesis of individual
texts. Nor is it useful for understanding writing to relegate these issues to a
mysterious black-box monitor as, for example, in Flower and Hayes' (1980b) work;
the postulation of a monitor merely creates something else to explain. Composition
research has now ably identified and characterized the major components of the
writing process, positing a monitor to coordinate the components, but a true theory
of writing requires more than an inventory of components; a theory of writing needs
a principled explanation of the workings of the monitor itself. Many key problems
in composition theory now lie arguably beyond the scope of "purpose-based"
descriptions of writing.
2. The Relationship of Text to Process. As Applebee (1986) and Witte (1987)
argue, composition theory also needs a principled explanation of the relationship of
text to the process that generates it. This is not to say, of course, that composition
researchers have avoided textual analysis, as evidenced by (a) the influence of
Functional Sentence Perspective (e.g., Witte, 1983), (b) research on metadiscourse
(e.g., Vande Kopple, 1985), (c) widespread interest and use of Halliday and Hasan's
(1976) work in cohesion, and (d) Olson's (1977) seminal distinction of text and
utterance (e.g., Dillon, 1981; Hirsch, 1977). Nonetheless, with the notable
exception of Witte's (1987) work on pre-text, composition theory has had little to
say about the interface of cognition and text. In Flower and Hayes' (1980c) model
of writing, for example, TRANSLATING is the least articulated component of the
writing processes, and in this model the interface between process and product is said
to mark a disjunction or impediment to the process: the writer continuously
encounters the "inevitable truculence of language itself, which seems to resist our
attempt to form a set of continuous sentences with forward and backward reference"
(1980c, p. 36). In this cognitive model, language clearly comes "after the ideational
fact" (Nystrand, 1986, p. 23-31).
3. Writing as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cognitive models of writing depict
writers as solitary individuals struggling mainly with their thoughts. While audience
has been viewed as a relevant constraint by composition theorists (e.g., as part of
Flower and Hayes' task environment), it is usually not seen as central to the writing
process. For some theorists, the audience is a fiction (cf. Ong, 1975). For others
(e.g., Elbow, 1987), it is too often a debilitating factor that unskilled writers would
do well to ignore, at least temporarily. A major postulate in composition theory,
moreover, has been that writing significantly differs from speech in the sense that
writers, unlike speakers, cannot interact with their addressees (cf. Olson 1977).
Entire developmental theories of writing (e.g., Kroll, 1981) have been based on this
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 69
Martin Nystrand

idea, arguing that learning to write requires learning to produce "autonomous" texts
that somehow have meaning only independently of writers' interaction with readers.
These ideas have been recently called into question. Increasingly the nature of
writing, like all language, is viewed as inherently interactive and social. Partly
because of writing across the curriculum programs, writing theorists now recognize
that writing involves more than the generation, organization, and translation of ideas
into text. More fundamentally, each act of writing is an episode of interaction,
ideally exhibiting intertextuality (cf. Porter, 1986), with a particular scholarly
community or discipline typified by particular premises, issues, and givens. For
writing researchers, key questions include: What determines the issues the writer
examines? How much evidence is enough? Which evidence is essential? What is
a suitable conclusion? To contend that it is the writer alone who determines each
of these in accordance with his or her purpose does not adequately explain the
principles involved in the behavior. Nor does postulating a black-box monitor as the
key element of the composing process do more than beg questions about the
organization of discourse. Other issues for writing researchers include: What criteria
are relevant to the writer's making these evaluations? What principles bear on the
writer's regulation of discourse? How do the character and possibilities of written
text shape the writer's options? What principles govern the production of discourse?
How shall we characterize these principles?
Clearly, for skilled writers, the very points they make, the examples they choose,
the form of their conclusions — each of these will vary substantially depending on
just whom they address as well as the context of the argument. And note that it is
not just the presentation of some presumably intact semantic textbase that is
reinterpreted for particular readers on particular occasions. Rather, it is the very
substance of the argument which is shaped by such exigencies. Just whom one
addresses, just which points need elaboration, just which need not be mentioned,
etc., are all considerations that shape discourse not just in its presentation, but at the
most fundamental levels of planning and organization.
In addition to writing-across-the-curriculum programs, recent interest in and
research on dialogue journals (e.g., Staton, Shuy, Peyton, & Reed, 1988) and peer,
collaborative groups in composition instruction (e.g., Gere and Stevens, 1985) have
vividly reinforced views of writing as an interactive process between writers and their
readers. Research on peer conferencing has shown positive effects on critical
thinking, organization, and appropriateness (Lagana, 1973); revision (Benson, 1979;
Nystrand and Brandt, in press); attention to prewriting and increased awareness of
one's own writing processes (Nystrand, 1983); and writing confidence (Fox, 1980).
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 70
Martin Nystrand

Bruffee (1984, 1986) has outlined the philosophical foundations of this work on peer
conferencing in social constructionism.

II. Problems in Articulating a Social Model of Writing

As users of language, writers belong to discourse communities. They do not merely

"will" texts; rather they work in terms of the issues, givens, and questions that have
already been established — that are "always already there," as Bakhtin says. Writers
do not merely address and affect their audiences; they also are members of and
consequently are themselves affected by their speech qua discourse communities
(Faigley, 1985; Nystrand, 1982). In effect, they operate in a stream of discourse that
has been in motion for far longer than they themselves have been. Metaphorically,
their writing is informed by the larger community whose representatives they are.
Nonetheless, the attempt to characterize writing by studying discourse
communities raises new problems for composition researchers, for, whereas
individuals are social as well as individual beings, groups can never be individuals.
Hence, to say that writing is "informed" by the discourse community to which the
writer belongs begs specific questions concerning the mechanism of the informing:
just how does a group "inform" an individual in more than a metaphorical sense?
Curiously, this philosophical blind alley is analogous to the problem of cognitive
models depicting writing as the "translation" of thought into text: by what
mechanism does this translation take place? In their efforts to balance
cognitive and social aspects of writing, writing researchers would seem caught
between a Scylla of naivete (individual writers "willing" texts), on the one hand, and
a Charybdis of imprecision (writers "informed" by their discourse communities), on
the other.
In each case, we may trace the problem to an underlying structuralist premise,
a social structuralism in the case of the former (i.e., the discourse community
"informing" composing) and a cognitive structuralism in the case of the latter (i.e.,
thoughts and purpose "underlying" composing). Methodologically, structuralism
proceeds by inductively abstracting general rules and principles from individual cases.
And for this purpose, structuralism has been and continues to be a powerful
methodological, heuristic force in the social sciences. We commit a fallacy, however,
if we seek to constitute actual individual cases from structuralist abstractions. This
is why the average person, theme, dog, or anything else can never be transformed
into an actual person, theme, dog, or anything else, and can never be anything more
than a statistical artifact, useful though such an artifact may be. This is also why
grammar rules do not transfer very well when they are taught: grammar rules are
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 71
Martin Nystrand

analytic distinctions — abstractions made through scrutiny of many individual

sentences — and as such, these rules are irreversible. It is easier to learn grammar
by writing than it is to learn to write by studying grammar. Individuals no more learn
to write grammatically by studying grammar than they learn to ride bikes by studying
taxonomies of bicycle parts.
Writing researchers seeking to characterize individual acts of composing would
seem hopelessly caught up in yet another intractable puzzle. On the one hand, the
legitimacy of writing research requires that researchers entertain valid propositions
and hypotheses about writing in some general, nomothetic sense, but on the other
hand, their concern for instruction (among other things) requires that they explain
individual acts of writing. (To some extent, this conflict has been played out by a
tension between psychometric studies, on the one hand, and qualitative,
ethnographic studies, on the other hand.) When they concern themselves with
writing generally, writing researchers seek to articulate the kinds of systematic,
normative properties that Saussure (1959) appropriated to the study of la langue , or
language generally. But writing by definition cannot be la langue, since it is always
(already) a contexted use of language, i.e., discourse. Hence, writing is best treated
under the Saussurean label la parole , which Saussure declared heterogeneous,
unsystematic, and therefore unanalyzable. What writing researchers would seem to
need, therefore, is a way to analyze the unanalyzable, some fundamental principle of
la parole , or discourse.1

III. Towards a social model of writing

In their efforts to systematize the phenomena of written communication, writing

researchers may take heart in other research on language production and discourse
analysis, for it is not only in writing research that there is interest in social models of
language. Precedents include work done in speech-acts theory,2 conversation
research, discourse phonology, language development,3 as well as social-interactive
research on language and thought.4 As language researchers have moved beyond the
sentence to text and discourse, they have also discovered pragmatics.
One of the most important trends in contemporary discourse analysis, as
Beaugrande (1985) points out, is the view of text as a communicative event rather
than a logical form. From this point of view, we note that the structure of any text
is open to analysis only insofar as the context of its production and reception — and
therefore the intentions and expectations of the conversants — are taken into
consideration. As Brazil (1985) writes, "Although speakers and hearers normally
cooperate, it is the way each utterance makes a presumptive projection of what these
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 72
Martin Nystrand

conditions are that has to be attended to when considering the communicative

significance of features dealt with . . . ." (p. 58). Communication begins as an initial
calibration of conversants' intentions and expectations vis-à-vis the topic and genre
of the text, and the discourse is largely structured by the conversants in terms of each
other's evolving perspective on the topic and the discourse itself; it is in this sense
that we may speak of discourse as negotiated by the conversants. Therefore, when one
person begins a conversation by asking, "You know that x I'm always talking about?",
the purpose of this question is not to quiz the speaker's conversant but rather and
merely to establish a common topic and starting point for the conversation. For
Rommetveit (1974), the result of this initial calibration of conversants is a Tempor-
arily Shared Social Reality (or TSSR), and the discourse itself is a progressive
modification and/or expansion of this social reality. Each modification and/or
expansion, typically accomplished through the introduction and contextualization
of new information, defines a subsequent TSSR (roughly speaking there are about
as many TSSRs in a discourse as there are introductions and contextualizations of
new information). Dealing with reading, Fillmore (1985) stresses this "rolling
horizon" aspect of discourse when he notes that "It is helpful to think of the process
of working one's way through a text as a kind of game with moves and states. A
move consists of accepting an increment in the text and making changes, additions,
and so on, that the text and the rules dictate. A state is the full set of expectations,
questions, and registered conclusions that a player has formed after a particular move
has been completed" (Fillmore, 1985, p. 16). Dealing with discourse phonology in
conversation, Brazil (1985) notes, "The most general characterization of the
[proclaiming-referring] system is not, in fact, in textual terms but in social terms. In
making the referring choice, the speaker invokes the togetherness aspect of the
conversational relationship, speaking as it were for the 'we' who are the participants"
(pp. 67-68).
It is intuitively obvious that a conversation, complete with turntaking by the
conversants, is a negotiation of sorts. But what sense does it make to speak of writer-
reader interaction and of the solitary act of writing as social in nature?
Writers and readers obviously do not interact in the sense that they take turns
as do speakers and listeners. But then speaking and listening are not interactive
simply because the conversants conspicuously take turns. Turn taking is merely one
of the many ways speakers exchange meanings and understand one another. Other
ways include furtive glances, quizzical looks, and so on. On occasion, it is a
conspicuously absent turn that provides critical information to the listener. This is
why turn taking is not interaction per se but merely the way conversants accomplish
interaction . The interaction of interest is what the turn taking accomplishes, namely
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 73
Martin Nystrand

an exchange of meaning or transformation of shared knowledge. In this sense,

writers and readers interact every time the readers understand a written text.
Writers and readers interact in the sense that they play reciprocal and
respective roles in the mutual enterprise of written discourse. They do not interact,
of course, in the ostensible way individuals interact in conversation. Nonetheless,
when the respective purposes of the writer and the reader intersect as they must
when the reader comprehends the writer's text, the meaning that the reader gives to
the text is a unique result — a distinctive convergence or interaction — of writer
and reader purpose.
Of course, there are examples of texts which, though functional in their original
contexts (e.g., Chaucer's tales), have ceased to be so for general readers today. In
such cases, where the writer masterfully matched his texts to his contemporary
reader's expectations, the texts have outlived the readers for whom they were
written. In such cases, readers may need to take a course in Chaucer, and/or an
editor may need to provide marginal glosses in order to revitalize the texts, making
them function once again in terms of the author's original purpose and new reader's
needs.
In any event, even the example of ancient texts that balance the respective
purposes of ancient authors and modern readers only with difficulty does not vitiate
the claim that written communication is a fiduciary act for both writers and readers in which
they continuously seek to orient themselves to a projected state of convergence between them .
The process of writing is a matter of elaborating text in accord with what the writer
can reasonably assume that the reader knows and expects, and the process of reading
is a matter of predicting text in accord with what the reader assumes about the
writer's purpose. More fundamentally, each presupposes the sense-making capabili-
ties of the other. As a result, written communication is predicated on what the
writer/reader each assumes the other will do/has done . As Rommetveit (1974) puts it, we
"writ[e] on the premises of the reader [and read] on the premises of the writer"
(1974, p. 63). Social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz describes this transcendental
social fact as a condition of reciprocity which undergirds and organizes individual
and social behavior of all sorts: it is "assumed that the sector of the world taken for
granted by me is also taken for granted by you, [and] even more, that it is taken for
granted by 'Us'" (1967, p. 12).
Clearly, texts do not take the shape they do merely because the writer wants to
say something or has something to accomplish. One does not merely "will" a text.
And writers do not merely "act on readers." It is more accurate to say that the shape
and direction of discourse are configured by the communicative need of writers to
balance their own purposes and intentions with the expectations and needs of
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 74
Martin Nystrand

readers. If the aim of writing research is to account for writer behavior, then the
claim that writing is shaped chiefly by writers acting on readers (by saying x, the
writer intends to accomplish y) fails to do justice to the multiplicity of interacting
variables operative during the act of composing, including (but not limited to) (a)
readers' expectations as the writer anticipates and interprets them, (b) the impact of
any previous communication with the reader, (c) the effect of the text as the writer
composes it on whatever remains to be written, (d) any reader feedback which the
writer anticipates, and (e) many characteristics of the context which give rise to the
communication in the first place. Hence, writer purpose per se says nothing about
the way in which what writers do is synchronized with what readers do when readers
finally read the text. This is the central reason why writing is inadequately
characterized as a particular mode of discourse when its form is viewed principally
as a function of the writer's purpose. Text is not just the result of composing, it is also
the medium of communication.

IV. What Writers Do

If we conceptualize writing not as the process of translating writing purpose and

meaning into text but rather as the writer's negotiation of meaning between herself
and her reader, we radically alter our conceptions of writing, text, text meaning, and

WRITER PURPOSE ö TEXT

Figure 1. Cognitive Model of Text Production

of the relationship of the composing process to the text. First, we note that text is
not just the result of the process whereby writer purpose is translated into text
(FIGURE 1), but also a medium of communication mediating the respective purposes

WRITER º TEXT ³READER

Figure 2. Social-Interactive Model of Written

Communication

of the writer and reader (FIGURE 2). In addition, we note that, in terms of the
social-interactive model, texts have meaning not to the extent that they represent
the writer's purpose but rather to the extent that their potential for meaning is
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 75
Martin Nystrand

realized by the reader. That is, we conceptualize text meaning not in terms of the
writer alone but in terms of interaction between writer and reader purpose, not in
terms of the text's semantic content but rather in terms of its semantic potential.
Cognitive psychologists (e.g., Olson, 1977; Scinto, 1986) and composition
theorists (e.g., Dillon, 1981; Hirsch, 1977) often note the stability and objectivity of
written text meaning, especially in contrast to the transience of spoken utterance,
and attribute this stability to objective properties of written text which are invariant
across the intentions of writers and the interpretations of readers. The central thesis
of this argument is that in written texts, meaning is in the text whereas in spoken
utterance, meaning is largely in the context of utterance. The fact that texts have
invariant objective properties, however, cannot be taken to mean that their meaning
is comparably objective, i.e., that text meaning can be wholly deduced from
properties of text. Any text has more objective properties than readers can or do use
in interpreting its meaning, and comprehending a text requires that readers treat
some of these objective properties as more salient than others. Hence, whereas
properties of text are objective, interpretations are not. As Stanley Fish (1980)
correctly argues, the problem with texts is that they can never not have meaning. As
Fish argues (and Frank Smith [1971] before him), our own purposes as readers
largely determine the salience of various text properties and therefore its meaning;
it is not the other way around.
Where Fish is wrong, however, is in his contention that because of the power
of readers' interpretive strategies, any text can mean virtually anything, i.e., that
meaning is altogether in the reader. In seeking to prove his point, for example, Fish
tells (1980, chapter 14) about a graduate class in which he literally drew a frame
around the homework assignment from the previous classhour and credibly pawned
it off on his students as a poem. No doubt the students interpreted it as a poem
because Fish led them to believe that it was the writer's intention to write a poem.
But in real life, of course, few writers are as fiendish as the poet Fish foists on his class
in this account. Fish's demonstration fails to prove that any text can mean literally
anything but rather shows that readers are constrained in their interpretations by
their sense of the writer's purpose.
The social-interactive view of text meaning accepts neither Olson's formalist
position that meaning is in texts nor Fish's idealist thesis that meaning is in the
reader, but rather affirms the proposition that meaning is a social construct
negotiated by writer and reader through the medium of text, which uniquely
configures their respective purposes. The limits of text meaning are determined not
only by objective properties of text and not only by the reader's cognition but also by
reciprocity between writers and their readers which binds the writer's intention, the
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 76
Martin Nystrand

reader's cognition, and properties of text all together in the enterprise of text
meaning. In other words, meaning is between writer and reader . As Bakhtin writes,
". . . [message] X is not transmitted from [the writer] to the [reader], but is
constructed between them as a kind of ideological bridge, is built in the process of
their interaction" (Bakhtin, 1985, 152).
In terms of writing processes, we conceptualize skilled writing as continuously
constrained by the writer's sense of reciprocity with her readers just as we view
reading as continuously constrained by the reader's sense of the writer's purpose.
This means that the skilled writer senses, in typically tacit manner, when her purpose
is likely either to mesh with or to run against the grain of her reader's expectations
and purposes. And it is in just such matters that social and cognitive factors interact
in composing: accordingly, she begins her planning. She crafts the beginning of her
text so that it will initiate a mutual frame of reference with her reader. When she
introduces information sufficiently new as to threaten reciprocity, she will
contextualize this information with an elaboration, perhaps an example or a
definition. Indeed, the recursiveness of her composing process may often be seen as
the dialogic act of righting just such imbalances in her developing discourse.5 She
will have some sense of the appropriateness of possible elaborations, and she will
have some sense of whether the elaboration should address knowledgeable readers'
needs for greater detail or unknowledgeable readers' needs for a definition of terms
or perhaps both (for a comparison of demands on writers addressing knowledgeable
and unknowledgeable readers, see Nystrand, 1986, chapter 5). She will also have a
sense of the accretion of her text, and when the information of any one part (sent-
ence, paragraph, section, chapter) becomes sufficiently long as to threaten
reciprocity, she segments the text into manageable chunks the reader can assimilate.
She continuously monitors her text for all these things, sensing, as best she can,
the "moves and states," as Fillmore puts it, that her text will make in the here-and-
now of the reader's encounter, i.e., in the context of eventual use (cf. Nystrand,
1983). And she treats as a troublesource each point in her text where she senses
reciprocity might be threatened, i.e., where she suspects her convergence with her
readers may fail. These potential troublesources for readers define choice points for
her, for it is at these points that she must fashion elaborations that will restore
balance between herself and her readers.
None of this requires that the writer must actually have met her readers or know
them personally, nor indeed must they even be contemporaries. The skilled writer
reasonably assumes that her text will almost certainly be read by someone who comes
to the text already sharing or at least open to her interest in the topic and, to some
extent, her purpose in writing, for why else would someone read it? It is only in the
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 77
Martin Nystrand

case of school writing that writers may reasonably question whether or not their
readers will share their interests and purposes, but my observation on this point is
merely to note that teachers are exceptional readers in this regard. In real life —
when readers pick up newspapers or check books out of libraries or buy novels to
read, etc. — they come looking for texts prepared to meet halfway the writers whose
texts they select.
In my social model of writing, skilled writers do three essential things:
1. Initiating Written Discourse. The beginning of any text is unique in that it
must function to establish a mutual frame of reference between writer and reader;
i.e., it must calibrate the discourse participants by getting them off on the same
footing. Most obviously in this respect, the text must establish a clear topic. In
addition, the text must also clarify the nature of the communication, i.e., the genre
of the text, for when a reader begins to read, the text itself is new information, and
the reader must determine from context, title, and tone just what sort of a text she
is confronting. And in order for the reader to make this determination, the skilled
writer respectively orients or situates him by establishing topic, tone, etc., i.e.,
metadiscoursal elements which in effect provide the reader with instructions on how
to interpret the text.
2. Sustaining Written Discourse. Once the skilled writer has initiated a
Temporarily Shared Social Reality (i.e., a mutual frame of reference), she proceeds
by elaborating the text which, by the introduction of new information, either
expands or modifies this TSSR. As she writes (or perhaps after she is finished and
rereads her paper — in any event, before she considers her text complete), she tests
each introduction of new information in terms of reciprocity. If this new information
sufficiently threatens reciprocity, the skilled writer senses this potential troublesource
for her readers, which she recognizes as a choice point for herself. She proceeds to
treat this choice point with an appropriate elaboration which will serve to
contextualize the new information and thereby reestablish balance in the discourse,
and which results in an expanded, modified, revised TSSR (i.e., TSSR2).
When writers fail to elaborate troublesources, the results are misconstraints,
i.e., mismatches between the writer's expression and her reader's comprehension.
There are three types: (a) Inadequate elaboration at the level of topic results in
abstruse text, i.e., a text that says too much about too few points; (b) Inadequate
elaboration at the level of comment results in ambiguous text, i.e., a text that says
too little about too many points; (c) Inadequate elaboration at the level of genre
results in misreading. It is important to note that no particular text structure is
categorically a misconstraint or categorically any particular sort of misconstraint. A
misconstraint results only when there is a mismatch between what the writer has to
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 78
Martin Nystrand

say and the reader needs to know. A particular instruction in an IRS tax form that
might be abstruse for the average taxpayer, who needs to understand the main point,
might well be ambiguous for a tax attorney, who already understands the main point
but needs more detail to understand the implications of the point.
3. Writers' Options: Elaborations. The writer's options consist of elaborations.
Text elaborations include words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs.
Constructions which might further threaten reciprocity (i.e., complicate rather than
clarify) may not be used. There are three types of elaboration: (a) genre elaborations
clarify the character of the communication; (b) topical elaborations clarify discourse
topics; and (c) local elaborations (or commentary) clarify discourse comments. As
with misconstraints, the effectiveness of any particular text structure will vary
depending on the writer-reader mismatch it functions to correct. Hence, the same
detail which might address the ambiguity for the abovementioned tax attorney would
no doubt overwhelm the average taxpayer, who needs a category definition (i.e.,
more information about the topic), not the further specification (i.e., additional
commentary) that the attorney seeks.
Elaborations which approach the reader's capacity for information processing
mark elaboration episodes, which define new choice points for the writer and result
in text segmentations (such as new paragraphs, chapters, etc.). To the extent that
an elaboration is substantial, it may well result in text which approaches the limits
of the reader's capacity for information processing. Inevitably such substantial
elaboration threatens reciprocity and, in so doing, defines a new choice point, which
the skilled writer appropriately treats with a new text elaboration. Examples include
new paragraphs, sections, or chapters.
These principles of text production are summarized as a reciprocity-based
grammar of written text in TABLE 1. This text grammar is not meant to be a set of
rules governing the translation of thought into written text, but rather principles
germane to the flow of discourse between a writer and reader, i.e., rules for writers'
moves in the game of written communication.

V. Conclusion

A major theme of writing research in the last decade has been the recursiveness and
complexity of the composing process. In hindsight, we may now recognize that, while
demonstrations of this complexity have helped legitimate writing as a respectable
area of academic inquiry by illustrating a problem worthy of research, we must now
note that our interests in understanding writing and written communication require
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 79
Martin Nystrand

that we bring order to complexity by elucidating basic principles and regularities in

a relatively parsimonious and simple form.
Flower and Hayes, among others, have clearly demonstrated the centrality of
the monitor in the composing process, metaphorically the central processing unit
(CPU) or chief executive officer (CEO) of the system. The workings and mysteries
of this monitor are now amenable to scrutiny and systematic understanding, I submit,
through perspectives offered by social-interactive models of discourse and language
production. Among other things, this viewpoint teaches us that more than writer
variables — notably the reader and the text — figure integrally and not just
ancillarily into the composing process. This orientation to discourse also helps us to
understand how the relationship between the writer and reader is essentially
reciprocal and social, and how the text serves to mediate their respective interests.
Texts are not just the result of writing but also the medium of communication whose
features are best understood for their capacity to bridge writer and reader interests
and purposes. Most fundamentally, a social-interactive view of writing underscores
the quintessential mutuality of written communication.
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 80
Martin Nystrand

TABLE 1. A Reciprocity-Based Grammar of Written Text

Axiom and Corollaries

Fundamental Axiom: A given text is functional to the extent that it balances the
reciprocal needs of the writer for expression and of the reader for comprehension.
Communicative homeostasis is the normal condition of grammatical texts.

Choice Point Corollary: Potential troublesources which threaten reciprocity define

choice points for the writer.

Options Corollary: Text options at each choice point are text elaborations.

Misconstraint Corollary: Inadequate elaboration results in misconstraint, i.e. a

mismatch between the writer's expression and the reader's comprehension.
Inadequate elaboration at the level of topic results in abstruse text. Inadequate
elaboration at the level of comment results in ambiguous text. Inadequate
elaboration at the level of genre results in misreading.

Situation Corollary: The beginning of a text functions to situate the reader in terms
of a mutual frame of reference.

Elaboration Construction Corollary: Writers may elaborate texts at the level of

genre, topic, and comment. Text elaborations in English include words, phrases,
clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. Elaborations must be consistent with
expectations initiated by the writer. Constructions which might fundamentally
threaten reciprocity (i.e., complicate rather than clarify) may not be used.

Elaboration Episode corollary: Elaborations which approach the reader's capacity for
information processing mark elaboration episodes, which define new choice points
for the writer and result in text segmentations (such as new paragraphs, sections,
chapters, volumes, etc.).

Elaboration Type Corollary: Three basic elaboration types are available to writers:
(a) Genre elaborations clarify the character of the communication and the text type;
(b) Topical elaborations clarify discourse topics; (c) Local elaborations, or
commentary, clarify discourse comments.
A Social-Interactive Model of Writing 81
Martin Nystrand

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Notes

1. On tensions between la parole and la langue for writing researchers, see also C.
Bazerman (1987).

2. Speech acts considers language in its total speech situation, encompassing

speaker and listener, writer and reader (as the case may be). See J. L. Austin (1962).
For applications to writing, see Steinmann (1982).

3. For a treatise on language development as development that "is necessarily a joint

enterprise of child and caretaker" (Schaffer, 1984), see Schaffer (1984). For research
on children's early writing development, see Gundlach, McLane, Scott, and Dowley
McNamee (1985).

4. See for example Hickmann (1987) and Mertz and Parmentier (1985).

5. In his unpublished paper, "Monologue, Dialogue, and Writing: Bakhtin and

Composition Theory," Hongsong Yeo writes: "Though writing is ostensibly a
monologic performance, it is monitored by a hidden dialogue between the writer and
the discourse community. The recursion in the composing process is actually
triggered by a dialogic struggle between the writer's 'inner speech' and the 'outer
words' of the discourse community" (Yeo, 1987, 4-5).

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