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For the last 2 years, I have been working closely with teams of social science researchers and auditors in the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) who write technical reports aimed at both expert and general readers. (1) A principal assumption of this work has been that bringing writing expertise to bear during the prewriting stage shortens project time and improves product quality.
On all he projects, I made extensive use of Linda Flower's work on the writing process, adapting my understanding of it to situations and problems at hand. Flower's work, which outlines a model of the writing process based on cognitive psychology and numerous experiments, asserts both the importance and possibility of technical assistance to writers. Working heuristically from her model, I introduced planning techniques to introduce specific audience-based goals and goal networks into the teams' writing process; helped teams create what Flower calls "the hierarchical structure of content knowledge"; and helped them mediate the largely unmapped territory of interaction between these two cognitive activities. (Flower 1987, 1988, 1991, and 1992.)
For each project, I found that the structure of the project's work program--what tasks needed to be done and who was assigned to do them--formed, in effect, a rival structure to any planning that generated specific audience-based goals as a starting point for the writing process. In practice, the structure of the work program had to be replaced before readable text could be created. Doing so required not only devising audience-based goals but also giving a new hierarchical structure to content knowledge. But the structure of the work program exerted a powerful and subtle influence on how teams created the particular hierarchical structure for their new content knowledge. In addition, the structure of the work program served as a powerful barrier to devising audience-based goals specific enough to be operationalized in readable text. (2)
This article describes those aspects of Flower's model from which I drew in devising writing technical assistance; the particular writing situation at GAO and my role within the project teams; and three brief case studies describing the relationship between the work program structure and the writing process. Among other activities, the writing technical assistance I devised included (1) showing teams how to create specific audience-based goals; (2) showing teams...