On 2/25/10 Readings

“The fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence” (19). So writes Walter J. Ong, S.J., in “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The ideas associated with writing and thought that Ong discusses seem to flirt with the whole which came first question, the chicken or the egg? At least for those of us who grew up in a culture where writing was not only an advanced technology, but ubiquitous to the functioning of society and relations between beings in said society. As Ong shows, thought came first, particularly in oral societies that moved (easily?) from thought to the spoken word. For people in oral societies, a thing—such as a tree—for example, was simply a tree. For us today, given the pervasive influence of writing, a tree can never be just a tree since we define “words by other words,” [a tree is different from a bush or a plant, at least in specificities; trees are differentiated among trees by type: elm, aspen, oak, etc.] (26). Someone in an oral culture, on the other hand, would determine what tree means “by putting the word in a non-verbal context, as in pointing to a tree, not by saying in words what ‘tree’ means” (26). Thus the technology of writing—which includes defining or describing things by using words rather than material realities (i.e., a tree itself)—changes how we think about the world in which we live. I liked Ong’s relating of the technology of writing to the technology of computers—both as something that we do not need to be afraid of and can, in fact, benefit society in unforeseen ways. But both, also, as technologies that can change the way we think about the world.

Ong’s article emphasizing the idea of writing as a technology that has influenced the way human beings think about the world serves as a nice prelude to the two articles on writing and cognition which—to me—simply means the way we think not only about the world, but how we approach the completion of all the tasks we are required to address in life. For Flower and Hayes, writing “is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (275). These thinking processes as regards a specific writing task are, for them, hierarchical, and include such elements as planning, translating, reviewing (each of which have their own embedded components), and guide the overall production of a piece of writing. Flower and Hayes’ model or theory of writing as a hierarchical arrangement of thinking processes makes sense as a means of working with knowledge in order to develop either new knowledge or an understanding of current knowledge about a particular topic. What bothers me about it, is that it seems too linear in that there seems to be no recursive or reflexive aspect to Flower and Hayes’ theory. No matter how good a writer one thinks him or herself to be, no one gets it right the first time all the time.

In “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing,” Patricia Bizzell takes issue with Flower and Hayes’ cognitive model of writing, even as she agrees with the basic premise that writing is thinking (and vice versa?). She goes on to discuss the idea (borrowed from Stanley Fish, et al) of discourse communities in which, particularly in the academic realm, students are, more or less, part of. Indeed, without building some kind of familiarity or sophistication with a particular discourse community, students will be unlikely to be able to write appropriately within such a community. As such, we as compositionists need to be teaching students about the conventions of various discourse communities. These discourse communities offer a way of thinking about the world in specific ways that must (can) be learned and, by so doing, perpetuate themselves. The way Bizzell describes this idea in a more general moment is: “we can know nothing but what we have words for, if knowledge is what language makes of experience” (395). From my own experience as a professor of World Literature, I cannot expect my students to write as academic literary critics until I teach them—and they (hopefully) learn the idiosyncratic language of academic literary critics; indeed, until I do that, they will not be able to fully partake in the discourse community of academic literary critics. From this perspective, I need to teach my literature students how to invent the university, insofar as the university (or a small part of the university, rather) is a discourse community of literary critics. Once they “know” the language of literary criticism, my students can participate more fully in such a community. Learning about how literary critics write is going to change my students’ thinking about their world in specific ways.

Of course, as a Composition and a Literature teacher in the freshman and sophomore classroom, and as Kellogg points out in “Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective,” I am just one part of a years’ long process of learning for students; indeed a process that can take 20 some years for students to complete or master and bring themselves to the level of knowledge-crafting—if they ever get that far. I loved Kellogg’s comparison of writing at an expert level to that of learning how to play a musical instrument like the violin—through a combination of dedicated practice as well as watching how such playing is done from others. It just seemed so apropos given that I feel I have grown and matured as a writer through a years’ long process of trial and error, practice, sweat, and, at times, tears and frustration.

I liked Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare’s article, “Distributed Cognition at Work,” because of the years I spent in the “real” working world prior to returning to academia. I worked for a direct marketing company for about 15 years that was privately owned by its founders who were family. For many of those years, I was an analyst, responsible for looking at numbers and, in so doing, providing interpretations for my higher-ups about what our future mailings should look like in terms of which customers to target (send catalogs to), how many customers to target (500,000 or 1,000,000?), customers from which age groups and from which spending category to target . . . and so forth. In effect, I was creating a narrative of past mailings and using those to craft another narrative of what our future mailings should look like with the goal being to make the maximum amount of money for the company.

Russell’s “Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis” was an interesting read—for me, most particularly as regards how multifaceted students are in their lives, i.e. as students, as family members, as boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/significant other, as community activists, etc. – and how those spheres can influence their involvement in academic disciplines and academic discourses. I feel the push and pull of these forces now as a PhD student in English here at UNLV. I am a literature scholar, specializing in Shakespeare, which demands that I focus my research on certain kinds of projects and that I write those projects in a certain kind of way. Yet, I am also a gay man, and I feel it is important for me to research and write about Shakespeare from that perspective—even if it is still a minority perspective. Granted, so doing may limit my options in the working academic world that, were I more of a Shakespearean generalist, might not happen. But I am not willing to forego the kind of research and writing I think is important . . . indeed crucial.