Writing and Reasoning

What contribution, if any, does written language make to intellectual development? Why, if at all, should we be concerned with the role of writing in our culture in general, and in our schools in particular? To what extent should we strive, as a recent report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has urged, to make clear and effective writing a "central objective of the school" (Boyer, 1983, p. 91)? If we do, can we assume that we will also be helping students develop the "higher order" intellectual skills, the "skilled intelligence," demanded by the authors of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983)? Questions such as these provide the context for the present review. At one level, it is widely accepted that good writing and careful thinking go hand in hand. This assumption underlies the concerns of the Council on Basic Education in their critique of the role of writing in American schools (Fadiman & Howard, 1979). The same assumption plays a major role in the agenda for research on writing developed by the National Institute of Education (Whiteman & Hall, 1981) and in the curriculum suggestions offered by advocates of "writing across the curriculum" (Applebee, 1977; Fulwiler & Young, 1982; Martin, D'Arcy, Newton, & Parker, 1976; Marland, 1977; Newkirk & Atwell, 1982). The role of writing in thinking is usually attributed to some combination of four factors: (a) the permanence of the written word, allowing the writer to rethink and revise over an extended period; (b) the explicitness required in writing, if meaning is to remain constant beyond the context in which it was originally written; (c) the resources provided by the conventional forms of discourse for organizing and thinking through new ideas or experiences and for explicating the relationships among them; and (d) the active nature of writing, providing a medium for exploring implications entailed within otherwise unexamined assumptions. If writing is so closely related to thinking, we might expect to begin this review with studies of the contribution of writing to learning and instruction. Yet research on writing has been remarkably slow to examine the ways in which writing about a topic may be related to reasoning. (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schorer, 1963, provide a good review of the concerns that dominated early studies of writing.) Two different traditions contribute to this reluctance: The first treats the process of writing as the rhetorical problem of relating a predetermined message to an audience that must be persuaded to accept the author's point of view. In this tradition the writing problem is one of audience analysis rather than of thoughtful examination of the topic itself. The second tradition assumes that the process of writing will in some inevitable way lead to a better understanding of the topic under consideration, though how this comes about tends to be treated superficially and anecdotally.