britton

I look at the world in the light of what I have learned to expect from past experience of the world. That is to say, there is on the one hand my world representation - the accumulated record of my past experience - and there is on the other hand the process of representing to myself whatever of the world confronts me at any given moment. It is as though, in confrontation, my world representation were a body of expectations from which I select and match: the selecting and matching being in response to whatever cues the situation offers (but influenced also by my mood of the moment). What takes place in the confrontation may contradict or modify or confirm my expectations. My expectations are hypotheses which I submit to the test of encounter with the actual. The outcome affects not only my representation of the present moment, but, if necessary, my whole accumulated representation of the world. Every encounter with the actual is an experimental committal of all I have learned from experience. (James Britton, Language and Learning, p. 15, quoted in Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4th ed., p. 90)