Ronald Reagan was President.
Michael Jackson realeased Bad.
Actor Ellen Page was born.
And Alice Glarden Brand wrote "The Why of Cognition: Emotion and the Writing Process". A lot has changed since then. Both Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan have passed. Ellen Page had a baby of her own in the movie Juno. And does anyone under the age of 30 even know who Tom Selleck is anymore? Cognitive Science has changed too.
It has embraced emotion - one of Brand's critique of Cognitive Theory. Says Brand, "We choose. Psychologists tell us that these choices are not random, but the cognitivists come up short when they try to explain why we choose what we choose, and how." This has changed. Cognitive Science now understands the role emotions play in choice (only the fist 11 minutes of the clip are necessary):
Another point of contention I have with Brand's essay is the notion that "The act of writing demands that concepts... be forced into linear patterns of writing". This may hold true of academic writing. But there are other modes of writing - poetry, creative, etc - which do not necessarily fit linear patterns (think Gertrude Stein). Are we to ignore poetry and creative writing? We are not to think of these forms as real writing?
These minor differences aside, Brand was clearly ahead of her time. Before Cognitive Science had a chance to catch up with her, Brand understood the importance of emotion in thinking and writing saying "being both human and impartial is a contradiction." Cognitive Science now agrees.
The implication of such sentiment is staggering. The idea that logic is not a significant agent of human thought or the writing process goes against all that we have been taught for decades if not millenia in the field of writing pedagogy. Process writing - putting together an outline, then producing a rough draft, followed by revision/editiing is, according to this new paradigm, simply makes no sense. It is, in Brand's words, "mechanistic" when humans are not computers. "The model assumes a motivation that does not exist." The question, then, is what would this new approach to writing pedagogy look like in the classroom? And even if we had an answer, how do we convince millions of people that, as Sir Ken Robinson already knows, the current model needs changed?
Brand's last comment was the one that lingered for me: "Understanding the collaboration of emotion and cognition in writing is both fundamental and far reaching. It is in cognition that ideas make sense. But it is in emotion that this sense finds value." In other words, without the emotional component I think editing/revising/ even initial composing would be impossible - because we need that voice in our head leading us one direction or another as we write, and as much as we'd like to think it's a skill - it's one very much guided by our emotional response to what we've just put down on that page.
ReplyDeleteI thought that perhaps Brand was stating that any kind of writing needs that emotional connection or it simply isn't going to be what Flowers and Hayes suggests is good writing. I think it is possible to write the outline, draft, and final product without the affect, but it lacks style and interesting content. Creating the paper without affect is the work of a "poor writer."
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