Toward a Composing Model of Reading

I feel like the five functions that Tierney and Pearson talk about in their piece, “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” is not something that we readily think about as we are writing, but after reading the article they are all such obvious things that occur during the writing process. With my Wikipedia article I recall that I utilized and completed all five of the functions.  First of all was planning which I did by researching my article to figure out what information I would put include, as well as looking around for model articles and figuring out my desired layout.  Next I took on the task of drafting which, like was mentioned in the article, I found to be one of the more difficult aspects of composing. With drafting I had to figure out where and how I wanted my article to begin, which is what I understood to be “the lead” in the article. Once I had my lead drafting more or less flowed with one idea flowing into the next. Aligning was probably up there with drafting as far as difficulty goes. The article explained aligning as stances that the writer assumes with their audience. The alignment that I took on in my article was neutral. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia so within it there is no room for persuasion or advertising. The topic that I did my piece on made neutrality challenging but I think I did well with it. Following alignment was revising. The Tierney and Pearson mention in their article that writing is not just taking ideas and slapping them on paper, but it is a process of going back and editing what you wrote. This is something that I find to be essential in any piece, and it is something that I definitely used in composing my Wikipedia article. I constantly was going back in and changing, deleting, and rearranging my text in order to achieve the neutrality and the information level that I wanted.  Lastly the texts talks about monitoring. I took monitoring to be a process that is happen concurrently with all of the other functions discussed in this piece. Monitoring is the process of checking yourself as you plan, draft, align, and revise. While creating my article I was constantly monitoring myself to make sure that what I was presenting and how I presented it was correct. I found this article to be very interesting because, as a I mentioned before, these five functions are things that must occur in creating a piece of writing but it is not something that people really recognize themselves as doing.