Marilyn Cooper's "The Ecology of Writing"

I went to this year’s CCCC’s session “Becoming Ecocomposition,” and I didn’t have a clear idea what it would be about. I thought it would have to do with ecology and writing about environmental issues. When Marilyn Cooper introduced herself as the chair of the session, I was surprised that people applauded. That doesn’t happen, so I knew she was someone I should have known. In the session, both presenters Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin referenced Cooper’s College English article “The Ecology of Writing” as the beginning of ecocomposition. So I decided I’d read Cooper’s article.

Her writing is clear, precise, and accessible. And she makes sense. Her primary point, which also is the principle point of ecocomposition, is that writing is a social-rhetorical activity—that writers do what they do and are motivated to do what they do because of social situations. She claims that like ecology (the science of natural environments), writing is ecological because it functions within social environments: Cooper offers, “What I would like to propose is an ecological model of writing, whose fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (367).

She continues to explain that humans are both the result and the cause of their environments and that writers interact with multiple, dynamic, interlocking systems as they write. She lists five broad systems in which writers work.

1.System of ideas. “The system of ideas is the means by which writers comprehend their world, to turn individual experiences and observations into knowledge” (369).

2.System of purpose. “The system of purpose is the means by which writers coordinate their actions. . . Purposes, like ideas, arise out of interacting” (369).

3.System of interpersonal interactions. “The system of interpersonal interactions is the means by which writers regulate their access to one another.” Cooper explains that two factors determine a writer’s interaction with others: intimacy and power (369).

4.System of cultural norms. “The system of cultural norms is the means by which writers structure the larger groups of which they are members. One always writes out of [within] a group” (370).

5.System of textual forms. “The system of textual forms is, obviously, the means by which writers communicate. . . . A textual form is a balancing act: conventional enough to be comprehensible and flexible enough to serve the changing purposes of writing” (370).

Cooper uses the metaphor of a spider’s web to explain the ecology of these systems. A web, “in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole” (370)—their interconnectedness.

Cooper also focuses heavily on audience, and specifically responds to Ede and Lunsford’s “Audience Address/Audience Invoked.” She explains that the Ede/Lunsford audience is very social: each other, a specific editor, colleagues, people they know from conferences. The social environment becomes the motivation and purpose for their writing (372).

Cooper proposes these ecological questions to encourage us to explore the social environments in which we write:
•What kind of interactions do writers and readers engage in?
•What is the nature of various roles readers play in the activity of writing?
•What institutional organizational arrangements encourage writer-reader interaction?
•How do writers find readers to work with?
•How do writers and readers develop ideas together?
•How do writers and readers alter textual forms together? (372)

Cooper concludes: “Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting” (373).

Cooper, Marilyn M. "The Ecology of Writing." College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375.