Genre and Cognitive Development : Beyond Writing to Learn

Abstract

As writers we all have had the experience of coming to a new perspective, seeing things differently, as the result of having written a paper, a report, an ap-plication or other text that has forced us to put together in a new way facts or ideas we previously have known. We are also aware that at times when we take on the task of writing a specific text our attention is engaged and focused until such time as we consider the problem of writing the paper solved—that is we find our thoughts sufficiently so that writing poses no new significant problems for us. When we emerge from these writing episodes we have solved problems novel for us, had thoughts new to us, and developed perspectives we may not have had before. In these episodes the basic task we have taken on may have been quite fa-miliar and no new fact may have come to our attention, yet at least the recon-figuration of the familiar helped us put the pieces in a new relation and think new thoughts. The autobiography and personal diary are widely recognized as creating new perspectives on the relations and events in our lives. Even such a mundane task as making a TO DO list can help us look more deeply and coher-ently at our activities and commitments. Similarly, when we have gathered new facts or look more closely at texts, writ-ing can help us move to a new stage of thinking. Sometimes, of course, we just learn new details from this exercise without changing our way of viewing things. Yet a fact or detail we gather in the process may help us see things in a different light—this addition changes the landscape in a significant way. Our old way of seeing things does not hold all the pieces together, and we have to do some fresh thinking and revisioning in reorganizing the big picture. At every stage of my writing life, I know I struggled to write some texts—in middle school, in high school, as an undergraduate, as a graduate, and now as a published scholar. If pressed at the time of writing I could explain the coher-ence of the paper in a micro or mechanical way—for that was the way I was able to keep from drowning in material I was barely able to bring together. But I was not really sure what it all added up to; it wasn't until later—a week later, a month later, years later—that some observation reminded me of the essay, and I had the sense that now I understood what I had written earlier. Not only am I Bazerman 280 learning as I write, I learn from what I have written as the formulations I made rattle around in my mind and change the way I look at things afterward. It is that new way of looking which then reveals to me a deeper sense of what I had in fact been struggling to say. In the doctoral students I have supervised, as well, I have seen how the challenging work of the dissertation has that intellectually transformative effect. As teachers we regularly work with this phenomenon. We notice when an assignment seems to bring out a higher level of thinking than we expect from a particular student. In fact we may design our writing assignments precisely to put students in a position where they need to combine information and ideas in ways new to them, or which requires them to consider issues from an unfamiliar stance. Although students somehow find ways to fulfill the letter and not the spirit of assignments, if we have guessed right about what the next step students were ready to take, we can create an occasion for intellectual growth for some students who get what the assignment is about. w r i t i n g t o l e a rn