The use of writing groups in and out of classroom settings (Bruffee 1984; Macrorie 1988; Moss, Highberg & Nicolas 2004; Murray 1985) allows writers to respond to each other's work less as a form of critique than as a way to engage in a conversation that is beneficial to all participants.

1. even when a writer composes as an individual, "the inventing 'self' is socially influenced"

In other words, invention happens when one sits down at the computer, facing a blank screen, but invention continues as one moves from the computer screen to the kitchen, from typing to washing dishes; the mind doesn't stand still, compartmentalized, because one's body moves locations and tasks, but rather, the body travels through fluid boundaries, only compartmentalized by the tendency to enforce linear demarcations between experiences and spaces.

pedagogy

"meanings don't come out of the air, we make them out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, syntactic fragments, from the mysterious and unformed. When we teach pre-writing as a phase of the composing process, what we are teaching is not how to get a thesis statement but the generation and uses of chaos"

“There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea: the combination or association of two or more ideas he (sic) already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was previously unaware”