n 1977, 8,779,OOO people were estimated to have sustained head injuries...in the United States. The incidence of skull fracture and intracranial injury is approximately one-fourth of this total or about 2,211,OOO" (Cooper, 1982:l). Most victims of head trauma resulting from such injuries in traffic accidents, swimming and diving mishaps, etc. are in the age group of 15-24 years, the population served by those of us who are secondary and college teachers. Often these victims find themselves severely physically incapacitated and learning disabled.
Trauma centers located throughout the country are now equipped with medical personnel and life-saving technological equipment which is saving thousands of lives that heretofore would have been lost. Computers often play major roles in the= rehabilitation processes, from providing diagnostic information to physicians to programming therapy aids. But once the acute care stage of medical treatment in the trauma centers is over, patients are sent home to face depression, lack of independence, boredom, and a bleak future. 52 Computers & Composition Vol. 5 No. I
Some patients with mild to moderate impairments are able to get help from vocational rehabilitation programs and become trained in job situations. Many more of these young people would like to return to school, but their inability to cope with academic demands makes them discouraged, and they drop out. Most schools are not equipped to offer these young people the sloweddown programs they would need to prosper. Many teachers are not trained to cope with head-trauma victims. This population of disabled students is a fairly new one on the education horizon, so we don't know a lot about how to deal with the student's particular problems. These problems might include difficulty wi th concentration, impulsiveness, disinhibition, and hyperresponsiveness; difficulties with vision and attention, particularly when there are distractions; memory difficulties; language difficulties; and difficul ties with problem solving. All of these are skills necessary for success in school settings; most of these problems interfere with the students' ability to read and write and, therefore, to learn.
New ways to meet the needs of head-trauma patients in the community and in the school need to be found. Writing as a discipline needs to be part of any rehabilitation program for trauma patients whether in a sheltered workshop setting, a skilled care facility, or a classroom.
Learning to write is especially important for these young people because of writing's unique contribution to learning. Writing is a powerful mode of learning because it is amenable to storage, review, and revision. It is a problem-solving activity (Flower & Hayes, 1984). Writing involves objectifying language, making it manipulable and separate from the writer (de Beaugrande, 1984, Elbow, 1985). Writing requires analysis, "the breaking up of entities into their constituent parts; and synthesis, combining or fusing these often into fresh arrangements of amalgrams" (Ernig, 1977:1271. Because it isa slower process than talking, writingallows for making sense of language by allowing the writer to work with the words she produces.
But writing performance on every level, from recording to copying to composing, demands the complex interaction of the physical writing network: the hand, the eye and the brain (Emig, 1975). Head-trauma victims need help in coordinating this network.