The Pregnant Pause: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Planning

Flower, Linda, Hayes, John R. “The Pregnant Pause: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Planning.” Research in the Teaching of English 15.3 (1981): 229-248. Print.

“What happens as writers pause? And if pausing reflects planning, as many assume it does, what is the nature of that planning?” (229) Researchers are particularly interested in the prolonged “pregnant pauses” of the composing process. They formulate two hypotheses that may answer these questions.

Hypothesis 1: The Linguistic Hypothesis: “Writers pause in order to generate or plan what they are going to say next” (230).

Citing Matsuhashi, Perl, and a previous study of their own, Flower and Hayes discuss Basic Writers and their preoccupation with sentence-level planning and the topic itself. Exclusive dependence on sentence-level planning, then, may be the mark of a poor writer. These writers often reread a sentence then pause to reflect before continuing, which reflects the nature of conversations in which planning too far ahead is quite impossible.

Hypothesis 2: The Rhetorical Hypothesis: “When people pause for significant lengths of time, they pause in order to carry out more global rhetorical planning or problem-solving which is not necessarily connected to any immediate utterance or piece of text” (230).

This rhetorical planning may be the mark of a more advanced writer who considers the audience and his/her goals for the text itself. While they may deal with content, they are doing so to determine what is important and how to arrange it. This requires the writer to envision the entire structure of the text and integrate all constraints.

Flower and Hayes used 4 subjects (3 experts and 1 novice) but fail to address how and why these subjects were chosen. They also note that the recording of 1 expert was not available during analysis, but do not address why. This study used think-aloud protocols to discover what thought processes occur during the pauses during composition found in previous studies. Subjects were asked to verbalize as many of their thoughts as possible while composing.

Flower and Hayes assert that composing occurs in episodes. To further explore this, they asked 4 ‘knowledgeable’ judges who have studied the protocol carefully to mark where writer seemed to shift focus or set up a new plan as well as 4 ‘intuitive’ judges and 22 writing researchers attending a protocol analysis seminar who did not know the protocol and were instructed to “use their intuition to make meaningful episodes in a writer’s thought process.” No other information is given on these readers. Flower and Hayes cite several measures of agreement between these judges, comparing them to predictions from a probability test in order to indicate the level of inter-rater reliability.

Results are demonstrated through summaries, statistics, and tables of data. Flower and Hayes determined that episodes seem to be organized around goals rather than topics and boundaries between episodes. Changes in paragraphs and topics are both poor predictors of major episode boundaries, but goal-related activities are strong predictors of episode beginnings. It seems, then, that the episodic pattern of planning is actually independent of content. Flower and Hayes also discuss the form of the rhetorical planning in these goal-related activities, which can take the form of content goals, process goals, and acting on a previously enunciated goal. These plans and goals work together to form a network to provide logic and structure, and this network appears to be the source of the pregnant pause. They admit that a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this particular paper, indicating a potential future area of research.

This particular study is a case study, which means that generalizations cannot be made from it; further research would be required in the form of experiments. Flower and Hayes fail to really make this point clear in their writing, though they do admit many of their limitations and hint towards future research.