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The Writing/Thinking Process
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world"--Ludwig von Wittgenstein
Recent research in the relationship between thinking and writing indicates that Wittgenstein had it right. If we can say it, we can think it. As we are required to think at higher and higher levels of complexity, our linguistic repertoire must keep pace. If we cannot put ideas clearly into words, we can't use those ideas in the world. We can't actually think them clearly. Precision in thinking requires developing precision in language--and vice versa.
To make the two processes work efficiently for us, we need to perfect four specific behaviors. These four activities are both physical and mental, and they overlap each other. But it helps to think about them separately to understand what exactly we do when we write and think. It also helps if we focus on each one by itself at some point in the task to be sure we are doing each one well. If we understand and practice these behaviors each time we are faced with a new writing/thinking task, we can perform the new task faster with greater success.
DATA COLLECTING
Academics call this behavior research. We all know the usual scholarly sites for research: the library, the laboratory, the Internet, the journals. Other very important sources of data for everyone, not just academics, are colleagues, peers, and friends who may be working on related phenomena and whose expertise can speed up our own research. Conversations of every level of formality give us necessary ideas in language that we can use. So we simply borrow other people's words to help us refine our own thinking. When colleagues share language about a phenomenon or mutual interest, we construct knowledge about it collaboratively.
Many informal sources of research data come into play when we think and write about ideas. It would be fair to say that all writing involves some kind of research. These other sources include notes, abstracts, letters, journals, logs, records, files, lists. Notice, however, that all are texts (a linear sequence of linguistic symbols that produce meaning of some kind), and when we use the ideas, what we are using are the words for recording them in these sources. In this sense, oral communications can also be texts.
Therefore, when we are thinking about something, we should be using our hands--jotting down the language for the ideas as they come to mind--and our voices. The sooner we can see and hear what we say, the sooner we can know what we think. Then we can refine our ideas by refining the accuracy of our language.
MENTAL PROCESSING
Since we have names to label mental processes, we can perform particular kinds of thinking deliberately. Understanding what the labels for thinking behavior mean helps us perform the actual intellectual processes. The following are labels for the categories of mental processes we use in thinking. There's a general sequence to them, but each recurs at higher and higher levels of complexity, and several will also be going on simultaneously in different parts of a text.
Observation and Description
These mental activities usually start in the data collecting phase. We have to look closely at whatever we want to think and write about and be able to describe it with relevant and appropriate descriptive terms. Every field has a whole vocabulary for concepts that it studies and uses. The first thing to do is find out the right language for the thing we are working on, so the people we have to work with on it will have the same ideas we have. When faced with an unfamiliar concept or phenomenon, we have to make a conscious effort to learn the language people in the field use to stand for and describe it.
Interpretation
Once we know what we are working on and have the language to talk about it, we have to decide what it means for other people as well as for ourselves. Otherwise, we can't use our knowledge about it for any useful purpose. Most phenomena mean something a little different to each person who observes them. Therefore, we often have to argue with other people about what the terms could mean. This is what scholars do all the time. Every time we "argue" with colleagues about something, we all go away with a better, more useful definition of what we are studying--because it is a shared meaning.
Analysis
Many times, a phenomenon or concept is so complex that we really can't describe or understand what it means until we study each aspect of it more closely--to determine what the separate parts mean or contribute individually to the whole. Therefore, we have to have a language for each part. We call these terms the categories for analysis. Each field has standardized categories for analyzing the typical phenomena it studies. But if we are studying a new phenomenon, or we are looking at a phenomenon in a different way, we may have to invent a new set of categories by using different words that focus on new aspects of the object under study. Being able to do this kind of invention usually marks a creative thinker in a field.
Synthesis
Another mark of a creative thinker is the ability to bring together ideas from very different sources and relate them to each other. In doing so, we are usually able to interpret phenomena in new way. We should bring all our previous knowledge and experience to bear whenever we are trying to understand something unfamiliar.
Sometimes the most effective way to understand it or come up with an original idea is to make a very unusual comparison. For example, a creative thinker might be able to understand something complex by creating an analogy or metaphor for it, which thus requires thinking about it with new words. One might say, "Sentence syntax is a train, with each boxcar carrying its own load of meaning coupled by linking words," or "The structure of the orbiting radio satellite is analogous to the body of a dragonfly."
Application
The real test of understanding is the ability to apply new principles to unfamiliar cases, using the appropriate language for describing, analyzing, and interpreting aspects of the new case. Thus, we are also synthesizing because we are connecting unfamiliar observations to familiar cases. We thus demonstrate that we know how principles work and can use them to solve new problems we encounter.
Invention
Whenever we think in novel and unexpected ways to come up with ideas that others have not yet stated, we are inventing ideas. Thinking metaphorically, developing new interpretations, finding unexpected applications for concepts, and solving new problems all require new ways of using language to think inventively. Writing down all of the ideas that occur to us spontaneously makes sure we remember them and can make use of them later to learn something new. Listing, outlining, or freewriting (unstructured brainstorming in writing) about subjects we want to understand better or write more effectively about are excellent techniques for "seeing" what we know about a topic and generating new ideas. Also drawing mind maps, visualizing, creating metaphors, and talking to others help us clarify our ideas. They provide us new mental symbols for thinking about them.
DRAFTING
Every time we rewrite our ideas, we are drafting them. Most formal writing is the result of multiple drafts that increase in coherence and elaboration, eventually resembling the standard forms for written documents for similar readers and purposes in similar contexts. For example, a research report usually begins with notes kept in written or electronic files. When working on a new problem or project, we should date these logs and document our sources, so we can track our thinking, give proper credit to others, and establish ownership of our original ideas or "intellectual property." But these notes bear little resemblance to the final document our readers expect.
These standard forms are called genres. Being able to use the genres in the same way as the established members of particular communities do helps establish our identities as knowledgeable members of those communities. They also help readers recognize what the topic may be--an immediate preview of its kind of content. Memoranda, for example, have a standard format. Before even reading them, the recipients can be fairly sure that they contain in-house communications about policies, procedures, meetings, company news, or plans.
Typical academic genres include persuasive essays, exams, e-mail, process descriptions, reports, position statements or proposals, and memos. Employees of workplaces use all of these, except the formal essay (unless they are creative writers or journalists), and many more. For instance, the same writer may have to write feasibility studies, letters, editorials, advertising materials, information brochures, annual reports, recruitment materials, and legal documents.
RHETORICIZING
Given this diversity of genres, each growing out of particular communication needs for particular audiences, we need strategies for deciding how to convey our ideas most effectively. One size does not fit all. Just as an informal memo won't do when a chemistry report is called for, no decision a writer makes about a text can come from a generic recipe for writing. We have to think rhetorically about how to write a particular document, which means choosing the most appropriate and effective features for that document from an unlimited array of possibilities.
We have given names to categories for describing many aspects of a written text. They are rhetorical terms when we are talking about composing a document to suit a particular reader, purpose, stance, and situation. These terms stand for the aspects of the context that we have to analyze before we can make decisions about the text. They represent everything we have to learn (and record in our data collecting notes) about who will read it, why it should be written and how we want the readers to respond, how we should reveal our position on the subject and toward the reader, and what circumstances made it necessary to write this particular document at this particular time and place.
Then we have to make deliberate decisions about all the categories of the text (and again, it's a good idea to write those decisions down in our notes before we draft the document). We must ask ourselves what ideas we need to get across, what the best order for them is, what format or genre the reader expects, what tone and style would be appropriate, and how to meet the readers' expectations in our vocabulary, grammar, usage, and mechanics. Thus the categories for describing and analyzing texts are content, organization, format, tone, style, and language. Often we have to revise a document once for each one of these aspects, for each of the four contextual requirements discussed above, just to be sure the text succeeds as a whole. Any inappropriate choice of language, style, or ideas, for example, can sabotage the whole text because the readers will be caught by surprise, distracting them and causing the writer to lose credibility. When writers do the routine writing required in their professions, they report rewriting the same text up to twenty times before it becomes effective.
Therefore, people who study writing have invented these categories for thinking and talking about writing and the writing process. As with any other phenomenon, when we have a language for something, we can think about it and understand it better. Before there was a field of Psychology, for example, few words existed for specific psychological phenomena, and few people understood these phenomena very well. But once some experts invented a shared language for the phenomena, they could think about and understand them better, and a whole new discipline developed. Writing is a disciplinary field like any other because it has its own language for the phenomena it studies.
Appendix A:
Thinking Skills for General Education
Discussions among the general education faculty who have participated in the Writing-to-Think-and-Learn workshops facilitated by the University Writing Program have defined and described the kinds of thinking that they feel are most valuable to students being introduced to their disciplinary discourses. We recommend that general education teachers derive, with their students, both the definitions of these thinking skills and the criteria for demonstrating them in the appropriate disciplinary conventions for writing.
I. Observation and Description: Students need to be able to look at the phenomena under study and abstract the salient features, describing them in the terms appropriate to the discipline.
II. Analysis: In order to be able to recognize the salient features, students need to derive, with the teacher's help, the categories of features to be studied and then use them in their descriptions.
III. Synthesis: Students need to be able to integrate ideas from a variety of sources to derive their interpretations based on deductive reasoning.
IV. Application: Students need to be able to abstract or derive deductively an interpretation or principle from their synthesis and analysis that they are able to apply to a new or unfamiliar case with inductive reasoning.
V. Invention: Students need to entertain multiple perspectives and generate multiple interpretations, solutions, or principles before arguing for a particular one. They need to be comfortable with ambiguity and take authority for a personal interpretation or application.
VI. Interpretation and evaluation need to accompany each of these thinking processes recursively as the thinker/learner attempts higher and higher levels of cognitive complexity. At each level of refinement, the writer can derive a clearer, more persuasive meaning for the phenomenon under study and weigh its value against conventional or new criteria.