Activity Theory

The articles: Activity Theory; An Introduction for the Writing Classroom by Elizabeth Wardle and Donna Kain, Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block by Mike Rose, Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers by Nancy Sommers, and Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity by Kevin Roozen, all contain similar concepts that are in relation to each other. These concepts are the crucial points that happen when writing a well-developed piece. The concepts that will be mentioned can either improve or hinder the piece of writing. The concepts of the linear structure, plans, feedback and the activity system are what make a piece of writing flow into its final stages.

I see the activity system as acting in the same way as the linear structure, though this may not so much impair the writing in a negative way. I see the activity system as similar to the linear structure because each point on the diagram is answered in a specific way. The ways in which each section is answered is not dependent on the activity, the answers may differ but they remain answered in the same structure. In connection Roozen states, “All of these available means of persuasion we take up when we write have been shaped by and through the use of many others who have left their traces on and inform our uses of those tools, even if we are not aware of it” (18). Thus initially stating that what we write and how we write comes based out of our own past. This is in connection to the activity system because the activity system is going to be answered differently dependent on the writers’ background. While filling out the activity system based on somebody else’s writing you must think from their mind. “The activity theory provides us with very specific aspects of context to look at as we consider the various factors that influence and change the tool of writing” (275). This quote further supports that when using the activity system, the reader must take into consideration the writer's thoughts and where they have developed from. Kain and Wardle state, “As people change the tools they use, or the way they use existing tools, changes ripple through their activity system” (278). This is in connection to a statement by Sommers, “Since they write their introductions and their thesis statements even before they have really discovered what they want to say, their early close attention to the thesis statement, and more generally the linear model, function to restrict and