James Moffett’s Ladder of Abstraction
(Exemplified in “I, You, It”)*
EXPRESSIVE WRITING
I
(speaker, writer)
DRAMA
(monologues, journals)
Self to self
Inner verbalization
NARRATIVE
(story)
Reporting what
HAD HAPPENED
POETIC OR TRANSACTIONAL WRITING
Self to another
person (outer
verbalization);
familiar, trusted
audience
Recording what
IS HAPPENING
EXPOSITION
(analysis
definition)
Self to known group;
familiar audience
Generalizing
WHAT HAPPENS
ARGUMENTATION
Self to anonymous
group; remote
audience
YOU
(audience)
Generalizing and
Inferring
WHAT WILL, MAY,
COULD HAPPEN
IT
(subject)
This diagram shows the increasing levels of abstraction (and therefore difficulty for a writer) as both
audience and subject matter become more remote and less well-known. EXPRESSIVE WRITING is the
writing closest to the writer—both in terms of known content and in terms of audience. It can be writing to
think and learn—written either just for SELF or to be shared with a trusted other person (a classmate, the
teacher) as part of the thinking/ learning process. Depending on the writer’s purpose, as writing is targeted
for a less personal, more remote audience, we classify it as either POETIC WRITING or TRANSACTIONAL
WRITING. Student writers often benefit from expressive writing to explore their ideas as well as the
scaffolding of an assignment that clearly identifies the expected audience and purpose when asked to
produce texts that are rhetorically distant from themselves.
*
From James Moffett. Active Voice: A Writing Program Across the Curriculum. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1981.