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But it is difficult, using this linear model of the writing process, to account for 20 Teaching Composition as a Social Process where topics and invented details come from and where essays go when they are finished—and to what effect. As David Bartholomae points out, “If writing is a process, it is also a product; and it is the product and not the plan for writing, that locates a writer on the page, that locates him in a text and a style and the codes and conventions that make both of them readable” (144).

It is crucial for a social-process approach to rhetorical inquiry that students engage the heuristic cycle of cultural production, contextual distribution, and critical consumption collaboratively, since students working in isolation may: 1) view advertisements and their distributing media as monolithic, true, universal representations, leaving accommodation as the only viable critical stance; or 2) view advertisements and their distributing media as monolithic, false, particularized representations, leaving resistance as the only viable critical stance.

This is one goal that students strive to achieve in advertising analysis essays. Yet it is naive to assume that texts such as advertisements—in and of themselves—contain pure meaning and that readers consume this meaning through direct and uncritical identification with the texts. We cannot, therefore, revise cultural values until we understand their modes of contextual distribution and critical consumption as well. The second moment in the cycle isolates contextual distribution as the object of critical study.