Writing as (Cognitive) Technology

This week's readings introduce the cognitive theory approach to writing. While the week’s scholars vary in opinion to the exact degree cognitive theory should have in altering the “current” approach to understanding the composition process of the 1980s, it is clear that these scholars are working to refine and expand upon the process theory described and developed by Elbow, Emig, and Sommers.

We begin with Ong’s revolutionary 1985 lecture “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” In it, Ong carries two critical tenants of the cognitive theory camp: first, that writing is technology, and second—perhaps more importantly for our purposes, that writing restructures thought. Comparing the technological, artificial act of writing to the organic, living act of speaking, Ong argues that writing is “imperious,” (19) “simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product … foreign to human life” (21). The argument, he compares, to the one made in the 80s (and still today) against the technological advances of the computer—and I might add—the internet.

But a more pressing claim Ong makes for a cognitive approach to composition theory is that “technologies are artificial, but—paradoxically again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it” (24). It is here, then, that Ong suggests the master writers interiorize writing as a technology and exploit its abilities as a dead monument to paradoxically create something so poignantly human from the artificial.

Interestingly, I couldn’t help but notice our debate over whether composition is a skill (science) or an art came back up. Ong seems to be in favor of composition as an art, comparing it to a musical tool or a part of an orchestra. However, as Bizzell puts it later, Ong might be suggesting a two-part understanding of composition; it is both a skill and an art form. We can study and practice the skill and science of the technology; however, composition is artistic in that we must then apply our skill to rhetorically erasing the evidence of the technology from our written artifact and make it seems as if is natural, alive, human.

Flower and Hayes’s 1981 article develops more cognitive theory to Ong’s cultural observations on the oral-aural and the written word. It is clear from the start that Flower and Hayes are reacting from the inadequacies they feel are present in process theory. Rather, they suggest a process of cognitive processes in composition, which can be summed by their four key points: (1) that writing is a set of thinking processes orchestrates by the writer, (2) that these processes are hierarchical and related, (3) that writing itself is goal-directed, and (4) that writers create both high-level and sub-levels goals which may change as the writer learns during the act of writing.

The most interesting point I found Flower and Hayes made in this article is that of goal-making as “the keystone of the cognitive process theory” (286), “intimately connected with discovery” (287). It’s a little bit funny, but as I was reading this article I found myself tracing the unrecorded processes of my own writing. I often do carry out episodes when composing similar to the “write and regenerate” process described by Flower and Hayes: I tend to think and set goals for myself as if I were still writing, perhaps to keep a fluid voice throughout my writing process.

Goal-setting seems to me to be the most important part of the writing process; however, as Bizzell will bring up in her article, it seems to have been relegated to a subsection of the writing process for Flower and Hayes. But the claim that goal-setting and its connection to discovery should seem to be at the forefront of Flower and Hayes’s argument, as it is Bizzell’s 1982 article. She argues that composition studies must be influence both by cognitive theories but also by convention: “to help poor writers, then, we need to explain that their writing takes place within a community, and to explain what the community’s conventions are” (402). Bizzell suggests the best composition course would utilize an understanding of the inner-directed (cognitive/process) and outer-directed (product) theoretical schools to develop a synthesized method for understanding composition.

Our final three articles for the week are all modern implementations of the cognitive theory into the past decade (or so) and also seem to me to be reactions to Bizzell’s call for a synthesized theory where cognition is both inner-directed and outer-directed. Dias et al. expounds on ideas of a distributed cognition where—quoting Salomon “social and artifactual surrounds alleged to be ‘outside’ the individuals’ heads [are understood to be] not only sources of stimulation and guidance but … actually vehicles of thought” (qtd. on 136). Dias et al. then traces the influence of distributed cognition in the university, the work place, the Bank of Canada, and finally in genre analysis.

Kellogg’s 2008 article, the most recent of the six, claims that cognitive apprentice programs are a potential solution for poor writers during their adolescence who are moving through stages of knowledge-telling to knowledge-transforming to knowledge-crafting. As it stands, Kellogg argues, there is severe limitations in composition courses that constrain skill development. Creating better writers includes systematic (product) training as well as training that will allow students to utilize their “knowledge effectively during composition” (22).

Russell, too, seeks a theory of composition that is a synthesis of the more conventional cultural-historical activity theory of Engeström and the more cognitive theory of genre systems developed by Bazerman. This synthesis, Russell argues, is essential in understanding the mediation of writing across multiple fields of life and adds to cognitive theory by suggesting once again that composition does not take place within the vacuum of our minds but rather in the collective, distributed cognition of our multiple, specialized communities.