Patricia Bizzell’s “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing”

Bizzell’s central claim is that neither inner-directed nor outer-directed theories of composition are sufficient, but rather elements of each must be synthesized to address the complex relationship between thought and language. Every writer is embedded in his or her socio-historical context, a specific discourse community defined by its own conventions. Bizzell contends that there is no universal cognitive process by which we all write, but rather that our writing is conditioned by the discourse communities in which we participate.

Bizzell situates her argument for the fundamental importance of the concept of discourse communities by giving an overview of inner-directed and outer-directed models of composition, and then offering a critique of Flower and Hayes’s “hierarchical and recursive” (485) model of the writing process. While she affirms the value of much of Flower and Hayes’s work, Bizzell highlights a key weakness of their theory: they treat writing primarily as problem solving, meaning as preexisting language, and language as a stable set of containers for meaning.

Instead of offering empirical evidence that would undermine Flower and Hayes’s conclusions, Bizzell accepts much of their model, but claims that it lacks explanatory power. Her evidence for this claim involves pointing out that while the Flower-Hayes model describes important elements of the writing process, it cannot explain “why the writer makes certain decisions” (485). Bizzell performs a close reading of Flower and Hayes’s work to show that it is based on a simplistic view of language. She also supports her argument by appealing to Vygotsky’s concept of “verbal thought” (486) and Stanley Fish’s notion of an “interpretive community” (488). As long as one accepts Bizzell’s foundational assumption—“we cannot look at reality in an unfiltered way” (492)—she provides enough evidence to suggest that the Flower-Hayes model only explains one aspect of the writing process and that it should be complemented by the notion of discourse communities.

Bizzell also explains the potential pedagogical payoff of incorporating the idea of discourse communities into the classroom. If Flowers and Hayes believe that most poor writers have trouble setting goals, then Bizzell contends that “these students’ difficulties with goal-setting are better understood in terms of their unfamiliarity with the academic discourse community” (491). Bizzell argues for helping students to understand the conventions that define academic writing, which will give them a better sense of what they are supposed to do when they write their essays. Rather than ask students to “make an argument” or “analyze a text” without any explanation, teachers should first help students recognize the nature of academic discourse and how it differs from their own native discourses. Showing students examples of different texts may help them understand the wide range of discourse communities and identify the conventions by which they operate.

While Bizzell’s conception of learning to write as “joining an unfamiliar discourse community” (488) is extremely useful, it remains fairly abstract. Which conventions of academic discourse are the most important? How might one convey them to students who truly have trouble with the basics of syntax? Bizzell claims that teachers can encourage students to think of themselves as “traveler[s] to an unfamiliar country” (496), who merely need to learn a new language and adopt new cultural norms. Yet, finding oneself in a foreign country is a daunting proposition.

By focusing on discourse, Bizzell reveals an important flaw in Macrorie’s understanding of “good writing.” Macrorie contends that all good writing shares certain general characteristics, that there is an essence to good writing which he calls “truth”: “All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth” (299). He defines good writing as being “clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light” (311). Bizzell would point out that those criteria only acquire meaning in the context of a certain discourse community. Moreover, if one wanted to follow Macrorie’s advice and make one’s writing more “clear” or more “economical,” one could only do so within the constraints established by a certain kind of discourse. As Bizzell says:

Even something as cognitively fundamental as sentence structure takes on meaning from the discourse in which it is deployed. For this reason, for example revising rules are notoriously unhelpful: they always require further knowledge in order to be applied. We can’t “omit needless words” unless we have some additional criteria for “needlessness.” (487)

Making the prose of one’s novel more “clear” and “economical” would be a different task from making the language of an instruction manual more “clear” and “economical.” None of Macrorie’s suggestions can be applied without reference to context, and many of his criteria for good writing would manifest themselves differently in different discourses.