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Historical Contexts

Ironically, we could say that the goal of embodying the instructor's "symbolic presence" which Martin Bloom and Lynn Bloom (1967) envisioned at the inception of the process movement has been achieved. According to Bloom and Bloom's "The Teaching and Learning of Argumentative Writing," a teacher's job is "to identify what stimuli and what responses are present in the writing process in order to reward and punish appropriately" (p. 129). Since "it is impractical to have a teacher physically present ... to sort out and reinforce" the student's better writing habits, the instructor must instill a symbolic presence within the student's mind "through general instruction in class or conference, or in some written form" (p. 130). While the instructor's "symbolic presence," according to Bloom and Bloom, is more than an editor, its primary goal is to help the student achieve "appropriate usage" (p. 131). The process movement quickly turned away from this behaviorist-influenced version of teaching toward a much larger holistic vision of the writing process and a teacher's place as respondent. However, this turning away from micro-level comments-from editing early drafts-when combined with advances in word processing software has created an environment where composition studies has abandoned the discussion of sentence-specific commentary-especially in computer-mediated environments-to educational technologists and software developers.