Linda Flower-Department of English - Carnegie Mellon University

Linda Flower

Professor of English

Address:
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Baker Hall 259
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
USA
Office: Baker Hall 145 H
Phone: (412) 268-2863
Fax: (412) 268-7989
Email: lf54@andrew.cmu.edu

Bio

Cognitive rhetoric is a new area of rhetorical research that invites curiosity about the ways people actually construct meaning as they read and write. As a cognitive rhetorician I am interested in the thinking process writers go through as they read a situation, plan, write, and revise and in the different problem-solving strategies experienced and developing writers use. In Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process we showed the radically different ways CMU freshmen represented a supposedly standard academic task to themselves. In The Construction of Negotiated Meaning I sketch a theory of how writers interpret and negotiate the forces and voices that shape writing. And at the Community Literacy Center my students and I are trying to turn this theory into practice.

Education

  • Ph.D., Rutgers University
  • BA, Simpson College

Recent Publications

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2008

"Talking Across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge." College Composition and Communication, 55 (1). 38-68, 2003