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Virginia Commonwealth University
August 14, 2012
One of the things every writing teacher knows is that students—whether they’re aware of it or
not—are composition theorists. They work from a set of presumptions, assumptions, and
preconceptions about how to get school writing done, and these guide their writing behaviors. For
instance, I’ve heard students say “I need a deadline if I’m going to do my best work. I need to feel the
pressure.” This theory works from the premise that there’s a relationship between the scarcity of time
to write and a writer’s level of performance—the less time the better. Another theory that I frequently
hear is that it’s a bad idea to begin writing before you have anything to say. Now, this proposition, like
any, certainly has some truth to it in certain situations. When writing an essay exam, for example, it is
helpful to know what you’re going to say before you say it. But as a broadly applied concept, the theory
is problematic. To always know what you’re going to say before you say it closes off sustained inquiry
into a topic. It commits the writer to a particular point of view, and rigs the process so that there is a
predetermined outcome. This theory is often manifested in students’ attitude towards the thesis
statement. When asked about their research routines, nearly sixty percent of the students in a recent
study said that they thought they need “to know their thesis early on.” It’s possible that these students
meant tentative thesis but I’m pretty certain they meant the final claim or proposition around which
they plan to build their papers.
I’ve taken to calling this the “thug thesis” or the “bully thesis” because it strong-arms the
process, muscling information into obedience with preconceived ideas. Where does this leave
discovery, which is at the heart of academic inquiry? It essentially eliminates it because discovery is
inconvenient. Don’t mess with the plan! This is particularly problematic in writing programs that
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emphasize inquiry, like yours (and mine), not only because it short-circuits discovery but because it
signals that suspending judgment—something essential in exploring a question—is a thing to be avoided
at all costs.
Surfacing these theories in the classroom—making them a part of the conversation in a nonjudgmental way—is one of the things that should be a part of the metacognitive instruction we do in a
writing class. That way, we might encourage the “unlearning” of theories that don’t serve student
writers well. This also encourages transfer of knowledge, so that students can more clearly see how to
apply what they’ve learned in novel writing situations.
Writing teachers have theories, too, about why we’re teaching what we teach, what we hope
students will learn, and how they might apply what they’ve learned when they leave us. Many of us are
sufficiently wedded to these theories that they form a kind of ideology to which we’re deeply
committed. I know I feel that way. We can look at our ideologies in all sorts of ways. For example, how
do we construct our students, as people in need of correction (the deficit model) or as people with
linguistic resources that can be harnessed and built on (the surplus model). Scholarship in composition
studies also provides us with taxonomies to describe our methods. For example, teachers who invite
personal writing are “expressivists” and those who emphasize product at the expense of process are
“current-traditionalists.” But I’d like to simplify this in a way that I hope is helpful. I’m going to argue
that there are two ideological positions that make the most difference in how we teach writing. They
are our stance towards invention, and our cognitive theories about learning.
The cognitive scientist John Bruer nicely lays out the four cognitive theories each of us might
subscribe to and he begins with a story. He asks us to imagine that a tiny country is being attacked by a
larger one. Outgunned and outnumbered, the country does have one asset: the current world chess
champion. Working from the assumption that the chess champion might apply his superior strategic
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knowledge and wit to battling the invading nation, the small country’s prime minister asks the chess
champ for help. This tale, of course, highlights theories about knowledge transfer. The prime minister
figures that chess and military strategy share certain characteristics. But is she right? Can the chess
expert save the country?
Well, that depends on your theory of intelligence. Bruer proposes four:
1. The mind is a muscle. The first is rather old fashioned, and I suspect the least relevant. This
theory proposes that the mind is like a muscle, and learning comes from exercising it. This is the
pedagogy of the 18th and 19th centuries that had students memorize Latin, perform
grammatical or logic exercises. There’s no empirical support for this theory, so while the chess
champion may have a limber mind that alone probably won’t make her a better military
strategist.
2. General reasoning and thinking strategies. This theory is embraced by those of us—and this
always included me—who believe that in a writing class we are teaching students how to think
critically, and these thinking skills should come in handy in any situation in which thinking is
required. The evidence suggests that general reasoning and thinking strategies don’t typically
transfer, so the logical superiority of the chess champion may be little help in defending the
nation. Composition scholar David Russell’s metaphor about teaching “ball-handling skills” is
apt here: can anyone be taught ball-handling skills that apply to both tennis and basketball?
3. Thinking is domain-specific. The premise here is that each discipline deploys different
reasoning strategies, and that these are always tied to particular context. This seems
particularly true in domains that require considerable factual knowledge. If true, and there is
evidence that it is, then writing classes in the disciplines would be more effective than a general
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first year writing class. It also implies that being good a chess may have nothing to do with
being good at military strategy.
4. Intelligent novice. Left with the previous three theories of intelligence, first-year writing
teachers seem to be wasting everyone’s time. But Bruer describes a “new synthesis” of these
theories--the intelligent novice—that provides a foundation for not as much what we teach but
how we teach. The intelligent novice is someone who, while lacking expertise, is able to apply
some general thinking skills, especially metacognition, to solve problems in an unfamiliar
domain. The intelligent novice learns to see the similarities between different contexts and
knows what general strategies might be relevant. This theory suggests that if our chess master
is good at thinking about his thinking, then she might indeed help save her country.
I find in Bruer’s intelligent novice a theory that strongly supports much of what we do in first year
writing, if we not only teach composing and rhetorical strategies but we also when they’re useful.
Where we stand on rhetorical invention is the other key element of our ideology as writing teachers,
and I think it’s particularly relevant to those of us who emphasize inquiry-based learning. Recall that the
term invention comes from classical rhetoric, and was specifically used to describe how a speaker might
choose the appropriate propositions that could be argued in a particular context and for a particular
purpose: advocating a policy, celebrating an achievement, or debating a legal issue. Note that these
propositions were typically existing arguments the speaker might choose from. In contemporary writing
instruction, invention has assumed a different meaning. As Richard Larson pointed out many years ago,
the challenge for student writers these days is discovering whether they have anything to say at all
about something: “[T]he task is to help students see what is of interest and value in their experiences,
to enable them to recognize when something they see or read or feel warrants a response from them”
(127). The classical version of invention isn’t irrelevant, Larson notes, when students already “have
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convictions to express.” I’m thinking, in particular, of the thug thesis I mentioned earlier. But nearly
every first-year writing class incorporates invention in the modern sense, teaching students to freewrite,
cluster, brainstorm, generate questions, list, and any number of other methods that help them use
language to think. Few of us are against this kind of invention. Writing to learn was, after all, one of the
significant gifts of the writing process movement in the sixties and seventies. But often we teach these
invention strategies as an obligation or an exercise with little connection to a range of writing situations
beyond the personal essay.
The ideological divide, then, is between instructors who see writing to learn as fundamental to a
range of writing tasks and those who see it as secondary to the other big concern in writing instruction:
the logical arrangement of information. My position is that the best teachers of inquiry-based writing
instruction are ideologues of the first proposition.
The diagram below might help clarify this.
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Imagine dividing the universe of writing tasks into two broad categories: those in which writers’
initial motive is to find out something and those in which writers attempt to prove what they already
know. We’ll call the first “open” writing, and borrowing from Peter Elbow, we’ll call the other “direct”
writing. Since the purpose of open writing is discovery, then invention—at least in the modern sense—
is primary. In an inquiry-based class, invention is focused on exploring the investigator’s questions. This
may lead ultimately to a conventional argumentative essay after writers discover their thesis but it
might also lead to more exploratory genres like the Montaigian essay with its delayed thesis. On the
other hand, instruction that emphasizes direct writing is much more likely to encourage students to
arrive at a clear purpose for their projects as soon as possible so that they can focus on organizing their
presentation. Invention is largely irrelevant in this scheme except in the classical sense of teaching the
importance of finding an existing proposition that fits the facts. There may be discovery in a classroom
focusing on direct writing but it is much less likely.
I want to emphasize that one method of instruction is no “better” than the other. There are, for
instance, plenty of writing situations in which the strategies that direct writing most encourages—
moving quickly to clarify a purpose and organizing material around it—are very powerful. I’m also
arguing here that we don’t necessarily teach one method in exclusion to the other; in fact, as the
diagram suggests, the two can be combined. However, I am suggesting that in an inquiry-based writing
class, open writing—and the importance of modern invention—combine with the theory of the
intelligent novice to create learning environments where first-year students are most likely to
experience what the Boyer Commission called “a culture of inquiry,” one in which students “share an
adventure of discovery.“
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