Cognitive Theories

Ong, Walter S.J. "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought." Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Eds. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. new York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. 19-32.

Flower, Linda, and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." Villanueva 273-88.

Bizzell, Patricia. "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing." Villanueva 387-412.

Kellogg, Ronald T. "Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective." Journal of Writing Research. 1.1 (2008): 1-26.

Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Pare. "Chapter 7: Distributed Cognition at Work." Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 135-150.

The notion that writers can struggle with more complex tasks because their attention is subsumed by lower-order concerns resonates with me. When Flowers and Hayes write that “the task of translating can interfere with the more global process of planning what one wants to say,” they restate simply much of what Kellogg devotes 21 pages to in “Training Writing Skills” (282). They have translated the idea better for me, a reader unfamiliar with cognitive theory. Each of the two articles does bring something different to the table, however. Kellogg spends much more time mapping his argument onto the established domain of cognitive research, and thereby enables himself to make bigger connections between the cognitive process of writing and other cognitive processes such as doing math and playing chess. In contrast, Flowers and Hayes stay more focused on the act of writing itself.

These disparate approaches reveal themselves in the articles’ organizations. Kellogg begins with long descriptions of the three stages of writers’ cognitive development before explaining what is necessary to progress through these stages and how education can catalyze that progress. In contrast, Flowers and Hayes split their article into sections that explore processes shared by all writers and pay attention to disparate skill levels among writers only within those discussions of specific processes. This organization demonstrates what I see as the fundamental difference between the two articles, which was originally obscured for me by the hefty overlap between their subjects: One is concerned with developmental processes across a writer’s lifespan, while the other is concerned with developmental processes across a single act of writing (which may be carried out over multiple periods of time). Process, for Flowers and Hayes, refers to the process made popular by the writing process movement, and is no direct concern of Kellogg’s. Indirectly, Kellogg’s recommendations for writing education do connect to the process model, insofar as he recommends that teachers model their own processes for students. The recommendations also shed an alternative light on process by arguing that based and experienced writers’ different ideas of revision are as much a product of knowledge-retrieval and task-balancing limitations as a simple misapprehension of what revision should be, at best. These observations about the links between Kellogg and Flowers and Hayes seem somewhat unnecessary to spell out, now that I’ve spelled them out. My first impression upon reading these two pieces back-to-back, however, was that they were saying very much the same thing. It took writing out the source of that impression to determine (generate the knowledge that?) that it’s generally true, but overly general.

The obvious next place to go is Bizzell’s “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty,” since it is a review of Flowers and Hayes. In her critique of the cognitive process model, Bizzell remaps some familiar territory, such as when she write that “educational problems associated with language use should be understood as difficulties with joining an unfamiliar discourse community” (397). Because of its focus on how language usage plays a gatekeeping function for students struggling to become academic writers, that statement smacks of Bartholomae’s argument in “Inventing the University.” As Bizzell continues with her critique, it becomes clear that what she sees as missing from Flowers and Hayes’ model is not just the concept of social construction of both writer and writing, but specifically the way that discourse communities shape writing. Although she does not privilege the term herself (she prefers “discourse conventions”), Bizzell seems at points to be referring to genres. Perhaps she avoids “genre” because of the need to avoid creating “universal rules for context-bound activities” (405). Nonetheless, she does seem to be discussing the very same concept of genre that Russell takes up in “Rethinking Genre in School and Society.”

Side note: Bizzell’s discussion also put me in mind of the grammar course I’m teaching right now. When we’re down in the trenches, discussing sentence constituents or participles or passive transformations, it’s hard to remember why we’re discussing these things. What help is it to be able to name and define various grammatical elements or moves? Of course, I thought of this very issue last week as well, while reading Hartwell’s article on the various grammars available to us. His point that descriptive grammar often bears little relation to the internal grammar that we use everyday to make ourselves understood to other people definitely jibed with my students’ questioning why they should learn this stuff. Bizzell makes the same point, but about descriptions of composing behavior as opposed to the act of composition itself itself: “Collins and Gentner can only define ‘good writing’ as writing that conforms to a set of rules set by some authority…’Delete extraneous material,’ ‘Shorten long paragraphs,’ and so on. Such advice is unhelpful to students without other knowledge that enables them to identify the extraneous and over-lengthy…The fundamental problem with this approach is that it assumes that the rules we can formulate to describe behavior are the same rules that produce the behavior…” (404). I may now have an answer for my students. Knowing how to describe grammatical structures will not automatically make them better language users or writers. It will, however, in specific rhetorical and social situations, provide them with a vocabulary that enables them to describe in retrospect what happened grammatically and perhaps make them more conscious of the grammatical choices they make as they’re speaking or composing. The descriptions themselves are not always helpful during the act of language usage (Kellogg would probably say that they take away precious attention from other concerns.) but knowing that a description can be created at the tail end creates awareness that wasn’t there before. You know, this made sense as I started to write it. I’m not so sure now, but I think I’m at least on the brink of something helpful to me as an instructor.)

Back to our regular programming: To frame his discussion of genre, Russell clears the connotative brush by claiming that “we must go beyond the conventional notion of genre as a set of formally definable text features that certain texts have in common across various contexts, however defined, and consider genre in relation to social action and social motives” (513). Sounds an awful lot like Bizzell’s discourse conventions. I don’t have much to say at this point on Russell, largely because I’m still digesting his argument. Of all the readings we’ve had thus far, this is the one that’s given me the most brain food and with which I feel the least comfortable. The individual pieces of his argument made sense as I went through them (although I need to Wikipedia Vygotsky), but the whole shape of it still eludes me. I’m not surprised, given its far-reaching and consequential nature. He’s attempting to tie together several major strands of composition theory in an attempt to make them all more productive and truer to the reality of the ways in which classroom writing relates to writing in broader social contexts. Frankly, I’m impressed by the effort, but haven’t taken the time to reread it and consider whether it’s a successful one or not. I will say, without the obvious connection to Bizzell, I would be very uncertain about how this article fit into the cognitive theory week.

Actually, I felt very much the same about the “Distributed Cognition at Work” chapter; it fits only because of its connections to Russell’s discussion of activity theory and how various activity systems overlap and transform each other’s inscriptions. Unlike the articles that directly engaged cognitive theory, this chapter seemed far more interested in how the results of cognition are disseminated and modified than how cognition leads to those results. My hunch is that that difference arises from the fact that this is a chapter and not an article. Right in the intro paragraph, Dias, et al. make the assumption that you’ve read the rest of the book and already know what the term “distributed cognition” means. I’m assuming they’ve also somewhere in this book discussed what “cognition” itself means. Without that background, though, it was difficult to make connections between this piece and the others we read this week. Moreover, it was difficult to even read this piece in depth. To a large extent, it felt like a poor man’s version of Laboratory Life (which, as you, Jeff, know, is on my radar lately; please excuse the comparison if it’s unfair.). The only section that engaged me thoroughly was the penultimate one entitled “Distributed Cognition at University and at Work Compared.” The authors’ comparisons provided for me a whole new dimension of the concept of power-imbalances in the classroom and how those affect writing instruction. Dismaying as it is, I think it can also be a usefully painful truth to recognize that in many way, students within the university play the same role as automobile sales at the BOC.

As for Ong. Oh, Ong. As always, a delight to read. This time, though, my delight was somewhat tempered by having recently read Mike Roses’ “Narrowing the Mind and Page.” I find Ong so persuasive and intriguing that I didn’t want to read him with a grain of salt, yet I kept returning to the anthropological anecdote about the tribesmen who, when asked how a fool would group objects, grouped them according to the abstract type the anthropologists considered preferably abstract (Rose 372). Even as I found myself nodding along to Ong’s reasoning, I couldn’t let go of the doubt that his evidence truly supported his conclusions. Certainly, for example, we probably wouldn’t have dictionaries without print. Does that necessarily mean, however, that, without print, we wouldn’t have thought of words as having definitions? Does English truly have such a huge vocabulary because we have dictionaries, or has it just been around long enough and been influenced enough by other languages? Not to mention, what does having a huge vocabulary have to do with cognition? In the end, I walked away from the Ong reading still a huge admirer of his and of his far-reaching ideas, but less willing to put weight on his conclusions.