Composition: History & Theory: 1980 - 1989
Bizzell, Patricia “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing”
Description
Bizzell opens with suggesting that the need for understanding writing gave rise to composition studies. She continues to postulate about the reasonings behind comp studies as somewhat parallel to teaching thinking skills. Yet, she reminds us that students do not come to our classes as blank slates, while she articulates inner-directed and outer-directed types of writing. (Inner is basically a universal structure that can be taught, and students eventually learn “cognitively sophisticated thinking and writing” and can then function in various writing situations (390). Outer, then, focuses on discourse conventions and communities where students deconstruct and find patterns of operation to better understand communities outside of their own.) Nevertheless, Bizzell believes we must develop a blend of the two camps if we are to truly understand composition.
After picking at Flowers and Hayes, Bizzell concludes they see composition as a “problem-solving activity” (393) that essentially is a “process model of composing” (394), not a systematic process, but a process that is “hierarchical and recursive” (394). But Bizzell is not sold on their conclusions since students, according to her, lack experience in discourse communities or do not understand various dynamics within such communities. She posits that any model must attend to inner- and outer-directed types of writing. Bizzell also offers insight into why a single model paradigm could take root in defense of composition. Nevertheless, Bizzell argues that forcing students to uproot from one discourse community and function in another without legitimizing the former or home community—we, as teachers, must accept and acknowledge both and “mediate” between them (407). Bizzell reasons, “Composition studies should focus upon practice within interpretive communities, [. . . . which will] revive rhetoric as the central discipline of human intellectual endeavor” (409). In so doing, we learn to “emphasize not only discourse but also community” (409).
Date of Upload
3 Nov. 2009