A concept to inform the teaching of writing

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to suggest that instead of dividing writing into different categories such as description, argument, exposition, and narration and emphasizing the techniques that correspond to each category, the teacher emphasize the processes of thought that may enable the writer to discover, analyze, and integrate his information. The study shows why the current-traditional paradigm and the substitutes for it such as James L. Kinneavy's aims of discourse perhaps divide writing incorrectly. The study incorporates the theory that writing is discovery, a theory advanced by Ann E. Berthoff and Donald M. Murray. And the study attempts to illustrate that the thought processes that enable discovery may be those processes of collection and division discussed by Plato in the "Phaedrus" and called induction and deduction by Aristotle in the Rhetoric. As the philosophy of thought has evolved, analogical thought has separated from inductive thought, and Francis Bacon establishes the criteria of modern inductive thought. The three--analogy, deduction, and induction--may be three fundamental ways of knowing and three fundamental ways of writing. The study defines analogy as the parallel between the essences of two objects, events, or processes. Deduction is defined as that thought which moves from a paradigm of established knowledge to particulars that create that paradigm. The study defines induction as thought that moves from a collection of particulars to a generality that states the similarity among the particulars. Thinking and writing guided by these three processes are kinetic activities moving from whole to whole in analogical thought, from whole to parts in deductive thought, and from parts to whole in inductive thought. The primary reader in this composition curriculum based on analogy, deduction, and induction is the writer himself. The writing process enables the writer-reader to discover what he thinks, to examine the information he sets forth critically, and to refine it so that it not only becomes clearer and more exact to him, but it communicates more effectively to the second audience.