Other metaphors for meaning-making, such as reproduction and conversation, are too limited to account for the individual's engagement in the process. Negotiation better describes the individual's agency within social constraints. Purpose emerges from the interactions of individual language users with social and cultural contexts. A cognitive view of a writer's purpose would see it not as a unitary, conscious intention but rather as a web of intertwined goals and plans, not all of which are fully conscious or rationally attributable to immediate context and text content. The writer deals with this web through a constructive planning process in which goals are prioritized to help guide the composing process even as the goal hierarchy may be revised during composing.
Good planners are opportunistic.
The reader's web also includes estimates of the author's purposes, forecasts of what may be coming next in a difficult or lengthy text, and so on. Framing such scenarios helps a reader group information and responses drawn from a text and isolate trouble spots that need more interpretation. Expert writers and readers generate more complex webs than do novices. 217 Flower, Linda S., and John R. Hayes. A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.