Response to Readings for 31 Mar 08

“Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought” by Ong

Ong reminds us that, even though we have become very accustomed in today’s world to writing and the notion of literacy, the act of writing is still an external form of technology that helps us think more deeply. For example, Ong asserts oral, or pre-literate, societies have a functional way of relating to their everyday environments, but they cannot be reflexive or philosophical about their lives because they can only speak to what is going on within the present context. In other words, writing gives us the ability to separate ourselves from and transcend above our immediate surroundings. To help illustrate his point about this technology, Ong lists 14 ways in which writing has changed the way our thought processes have evolved over time and further distanced “knower from known” (24).

Every time I have read something by Ong I have been completely amazed by his ability to make me re-think my ideas of orality, writing, and cognition, and this reading is no exception. Ong’s example of the different ways in which literate and illiterate people would consider the word “nevertheless,” for example, really reminded me that the sound of words and the words themselves would have either great meaning or no meaning at all depending on the person involved. As a member of Ong’s targeted audience, I too forget that writing is not always a large part of everyone’s existence and that it really does allow us to think about life on different terms.

As usual, I liked Ong’s writing a great deal, but one curious area for me was in his assertion that we “grasp truth articulately only in events….Full truth is deeper than articulation” (20). I’m sure he doesn’t mean “truth” in the Platonic sense, but he does make it appear that truth is something outside of ourselves here. Or does he mean that writing, as a technology for helping us discover how we feel and think about life, allows us to obtain our own interpretation of truth?

“A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” by Flower and Hayes

Flower and Hayes acknowledge that the traditionally accepted “stages models of writing” (275) give us a general idea of what a writer does during the writing process but assert that they don’t really allow us to understand how a writer thinks while writing. To provide a starting point for more research on this issue, Flower and Hayes study think-aloud protocols to determine the cognitive patterns of writers and explain the results of their analysis.

Using four key points to sum up their cognitive process theory, Flower and Hayes suggest the writing process is made up of discrete ways of thinking that function together within a hierarchical organization. Based on the goals – process and content – that writers establish during the writing process, authors can access the different cognitive processes and organize them into whatever form best fits the current situation. In other words, writers do not think in a linear way but in a recursive fashion and pull “tools” from their toolbox as needed.

I found this article to be very interesting, and I have rarely read through a cognitive analysis as quickly as I did this time. I have to say that I admire the way the authors took an abstract theory and made it more clear and concrete. The model (278) the authors provided for their theory of writing was very helpful in showing how the different cognitive processes interact over and over again as a writer develops a text. I can definitely see, for example, how the “generating” process not only ties to “planning” as a writer composes but also is a factor in the “reviewing” phase as a writer decides what he/she needs to revise about a text. As I think about my own writing, I know that I often – to my own detriment at times – “evaluate” sentences and paragraphs as I am “translating” them. I need to learn to turn off the “monitor” in me sometimes.

I also now understand what Flower and Hayes mean about long-term memory and its influence on the schematics we might have for writing. I believe this is why some students have problems adjusting to an assignment and say, “But, this is how I write (or have done it).” I think we often become locked into writing a certain way based on “muscle memory” rather than accommodating whatever task we need to do.

Flower and Hayes make me now wonder, though, how a writing teacher’s comments on a student draft would affect the writer’s cognitive processes. Off the top of my head, I would think a teacher’s comments would re-activate the “planning” and “evaluating” cognitive processes as well as impact the overall goals the writer sets for the task. For example, a student’s new goal might be to fix whatever perceived problem exists in the text. This would be a very intriguing study, I think.

“Cognition, Convention, and Certainty” by Bizzell

Interestingly, Bizzell appears to try and answer the question I raised after reading Flower and Hayes. Bizzell, for example, believes that the purely “inner-directed” (388) cognitive theories of writing, such as Flower and Hayes’s, do not adequately address questions like mine regarding how a student’s thinking would change based on interaction within a social context (i.e. discussions with a teacher). Similarly, Bizzell asserts that purely “outer-directed” (388) cognitive theories do not provide a good answer either. Instead, Bizzell ultimately calls for a combined cognitive approach which would contain elements of both inner/outer theories.

I could certainly see Bizzell’s point of view in her article, but I was a little disappointed in the way she took Flower and Hayes’s theory a little too literally at times. For example, Bizzell frequently states that Flower and Hayes feel their theory is the only one that will work and that it is “superior to other theorists’ work” (394), but I did not comprehend that to be Flower and Hayes’s point in their piece. In fact, early on Flower and Hayes referred to their efforts as at attempt to “lay groundwork for more detailed study of thinking processes in writing” (Flower and Hayes 274). So, obviously Flower and Hayes were leaving room for future theorists.

Another way that Bizzell oversimplifies Flower and Hayes’s work is in her assertions that Flower and Hayes’s theory separates “planning” and “translating” with no thought to how they correspond. Again, I don’t think Flower and Hayes ever said that the cognitive phases remained separate and distinct when a writer is working. They simply had to show the cognitive processes as distinct elements in order to easily explain the components of their model. In fact, Flower and Hayes repeatedly showed how the “planning,” “translating,” and “reviewing” processes continually melded with each other during the writing process. I can understand Bizzell’s desire to illustrate the weaknesses of what she believes is an undeveloped theory, but I think she did a disservice to Flower and Hayes.

“Distributed Cognition at Work” by Dias et al.

Dias et al. argue that distributed cognition in a university classroom cannot have the same meaning or goals as distributed cognition in a workplace. They assert that, since students do not work in cooperation with the higher levels of academic hierarchy to move toward a common goal, the university is not able to duplicate what takes place in the distributed cognition of a business such as the Bank of Canada (BOC). The BOC must rely on many different employees from various levels to produce thinking and text (which include specialized genres, styles, and modes of argumentation) so the bank can function within the corporate discourse community and achieve the institution’s ultimate goals. The authors conclude that the cognitive processes which involve students should be thought of more as “socially shared knowledge” (137).

I always try to find something positive to say about our readings, but I’m having a difficult time with this one. I found myself repeatedly thinking “Okay, so what?” to most of the points that Dias et al. make in their extended analysis of the BOC. I don’t know about other readers, but I never really thought in the first place that employees – whose primary responsibilities are to further the interests of a company – were very comparable to university students whose primary goal is more personal and ego-centric. Maybe I could understand the need for this reading better if I had read it in context with the rest of the book from which it came. This could help because Dias et al. consistently refer the reader to previous sections.