The Creative Reader

In trying to remember the food items on the list, you likely had difficulty with comprehension and recall because you were given no framework for understanding and you were distracted by unrelated information. As a result, you were left to wonder about the list and its purpose. In the absence of meaning, readers tend to construct their own meaning in order to facilitate their understanding. This is known as the condition of the creative reader. Linda Flower, who coined the term, describes the creative reader this way:

What happens when readers go about decoding messages and creating meanings? The first thing to notice is that they just don't remember all the things we tell them. Instead of remembering all the details, readers do something much more creative — they draw inferences as they read and use the writer's ideas to form their own concepts. In other words, readers remember not what we tell them, but what they tell themselves.

Flower, Linda, 1993, Problem-solving strategies for writing, 4th edition (Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).