Literacy is shaped by literate, social, and cultural practices of a community, but, at the same time, it is a personal attempt to communicate. The issues of positioning within a community, communicative intent, and mediating social practices overshadow the mechanical concerns usually associated with literacy. A social-cognitive view of literacy, which situates the individual within a social context, explains more of the diversity and complexity of literate action. To examine an individual's thinking within the context of literate action can reveal the underlying logic of literate performance. 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.