Cognitive Theory and the Writing Process

Discussion Questions:

How did the cognitive movement reignite the practices of Current Traditional Rhetoric?

How would composition theory differ if we aimed to fix our teaching and institutions instead of the student?

How does composition research and theory reflect the cultural and social pressures on "professionals" in the field? how do the anxieties of people in the composition and rhetoric field reflect in their research?

The Cognitive Movement

The Cognitive Movement built off of the writing process moment and aimed to quantify and scientize the writing process. The movement used cognitive psychology to study the mental decisions that writers make when producing a text. In American culture and academia, the positivist movement emphasized empirical, quantitative, and objective research methodologies as more valuable than qualitative data. Positivism is deeply embedded in the cognitive movement as writers like Andrea A. Lunsford attempted to differentiate, measure and categorize writers based on their writing quality and "intellectual development". The line of inquiry that motivated the cognitive movement was not inherently bad. Flower and Hayes' "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing" centered around the question: "What guides the decision writers make as they write?" (273). Their article introduced the possible cognitive processes involved in composing and writing and laid the foundation for a field of study that connected thinking and psychology to writing (Flower & Hayes 274). But, articles like Lunsford's "Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer" incorrectly connected intellectual and mental development to writing quality, inevitably and inequitably labeling and categorizing students as cognitively underdeveloped. 

The Limitations: How did these cognitive judgments "domino quickly toward stereotypes about race, class, and gender" (Rose, p. 377).

In Lunsford's article, she states that "In general, my study of basic writers-their strategies, processes, and products-leads me to believe that they have not attained that level of cognitive development which would allow them to form abstractions or conceptions” (299). Lunsford equates poor writing with being cognitively underdeveloped, labeling them as "basic writers". Lunsfords "cognitive psychology theory" is based on Jean Piaget's developmental schedule which only addresses children up to 11 years old in terms of learning math and logic. Therefore, using Piaget's theory on adults in the field of writing studies ignores that these writers are complicated individuals who are mature adults, not undeveloped children. Furthermore, Piaget's theory centered around logic and math. Using Piaget's theory undermines the social complexities of writing and scientizes writing unethically. 

Lunsford then states that the cognitively underdeveloped writer has an "ego problem". She writes, “Although children first begin to ‘de-center’ as easy as the preoperational stage, egocentricity is still strong in the concrete stage, and, indeed, we apparently continue the process of ‘de-centering’ throughout our lives” (301). She then goes on to prove this theory by including a three-page verb tense test that looks like something straight out of a Current Traditional Rhetoric textbook. The cognitive theory viewed basic writers as dumb, impaired, and even self-centered children. The theory completely ignores the political and social contexts of defining "good writing", and correlates writing in SAE with intelligence. Individuals whose cultural, social, and economic backgrounds deviate from Lunsford's standardized "good English" are deemed stupid and incapable of higher-order thinking. 

Critics like Mike Rose call out the cognitive theory for its harmful reduction of both language use and the individual "basic writer". Rose reflects on the American tendency in education to seek a single explanation for poor student performance and find a "quick fix". Rose states that these theories are "textbook-neat, but, as much recent cognitive research demonstrates, they are narrow and misleading" (346). To scientize writing is to deny writing as a social mechanism that occurs within specific diverse contexts. Rose argues, “And though this approach has occasionally been challenged in journals, it maintains a popular currency and encourages a series of bold assertions: poor writers cant form abstractions; they are incapable of analysis; they perceive the world as an undifferentiated whole; the speech patterns they've acquired in their communities seriously limit their critical capacity” (346). There are social and political hierarchies embedded in cognitive dichotomies like "basic writer" and "non-basic writer". Cognitive composition theory perpetuated the racialized and classist stereotypes of language users, flattening differences instead of elaborating.