TEXT PRODUCTION

Toward a Science of Composition

Robert de Beaugrande

University of Florida

1984

Volume XI in the Series

ADVANCES IN DISCOURSE PROCESSES

Roy O. Freedle, Editor

A Retrospective from 2004

    My original impetus to undertake this book came from being, yes, an English composition teacher, a calling widely regarded (even by others in it) as a lowly drudgery mostly for pursuing and pillaging the “mechanics” (“misspellings”, “bad grammar”, “sentence fragments”, and such evils), sullenly awaiting the apotheosis up to ‘teaching high literature’. To my surprise and dismay, many of my colleagues saw no special need to inform themselves about their profession; they hadn’t even read such basic books as Ed Corbett. Mina Shaughnessy, or Gary Tate’s fine gallery of “bibliographies”. They ‘taught’ by intuition, by personal notions and biases, often just copying their own previous composition teachers, ignoring the dramatic demographic changes of language varieties among students under way then.

    When I became involved on the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC, spoken as ‘the four C’s’), I seemed to sense a sluggish generation shift of power from the old mandarins who saw no special significance or revelevance in what I would call ‘empirical research’ (like Ross Winterowd, Ed Corbett, Frank D’Angelo, Joe Williams, Willliam Irmscher, and (gag) Frank O’Hare) — plus, abruptly and belatedly , Don Hirsch — and a younger crowd who were active in specific areas of research (like Mike Rose, Andrew Kerek, John Daly, Martin Nystrand, Dixie Goswami, Ann Feldman Matsuhashi, Robert Gundlach, and  Stanford Gwim), plus a loose collage of bright minds who were not in the composition field per se, but had some related interest in writing or text production (like Frieda Goldman-Eisler, Wallace Chafe, Carl Frederiksen, Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, Herbert and Eve Clark, James Deese, Walter Kintsch, Heinz Mandl, Olga Akhmanova, and Jozef Vachek).

    What I did not see and what prompted me to write this erm, large book, was the lack of work I could find on text production from a fully multidisciplinary perspective on its vast but somehow integral complexity. So I plunged in headfirst, with unflagging encouragement of the late and lamented Walter Johnson, founder of Ablex — but not from “research foundations”, one of whom who actually wrote “The Principal Investigator is in an English Department and therefore [my italics] can have no deeper understanding of these concepts” — gormlessly unaware that I had introduced some of those concepts in earlier years).

     I did not anticipate such a mammoth ‘research work’ with 1242 ‘References’ (which still has far too many omissions), but, well, there it was, and Walter (then in his 80s, but “with the spirit o' five-and-twenty in him still”, as Sam Veller would attest) said “whatever you like”, saving me from the routine jeremiads of arrant “reviewers” whose very job is to know better than I do how to write books — especially fat books which further annoyed them by having no model or precedent. I think nobody every reviewed it either, probably for the same reason.

      As far as I could tell, it was (to put it mildly) not joyously welcomed by the CCCC, most of whose members, mandarins or not, stayed in their safe, well-paid corners. But it did reach quite a few other disciplines, often outside the US of A. including the ‘socialist’ countries, where it was passed around very surreptitiously, as I later learned.   

    I should stress here that this and my later books are NOT rehashes of my earlier ones, in contrast to some authors I won’t name here (however much they deserve it). Most of my larger schemes and terminologies were, at the time, I believe, original, such as the principles of linear systems. Neither is it an arcane ‘theory’ book, as many called it as a pretext to stick with little ‘practice books’ like (yawn) Strunk and White). It is, on the contrary, filled with actual teaching techniques, pilot projects with results, and student data. And 550 text  examples not made up by me., and mostly authentic student data.

     And then there are touches of humour for those who relish them, like Frank O’Hare’s floating rock formations (II.3.45). Science should be fun, too.  

Technicalities of the Format of this E-Version  

   I have occasionally improved on the original wording, but of course have not tried to convert the viewpoint from 1984 to 2004. In return, I was very pleased that not much is said here that I would repudiate today. The ms. was written on an Apple II (with those ghastly 5 ½ floppies that held about five pages each); and the graphics, which I did by hand in those days, are now jpgsm and  even after I did some arduous retouching, are not as dark or clear as I would like. The font is a user-friendly 12-pt Ariel, with  the150% line spacing which the Internet seems to demand. Both font and spacing could be reduced if you wanted to make a print-out., say 11pt Times New Roman, single spaced.

     Since page length was increased to conserve bulk, the original pagination is not shown as such. Numbers in {curly brackets} mark the old page divisions, but I omitted them where they might have been intrusive or confusing;  write me if you need any you don’t find.   Footnotes have been moved to appear in [square brackets] right after where they were marked..  The paragraphs are numbered for easier cross references than by page, though I have heard colleagues say ‘”I won’t read a book with numbered paragraphs,” which they find "intimidating". One wonders if they read at all.

CONTENTS

I. The Context of Communication

1. A “science” of composition?

2. Literacy: Critique of a crisis

3. Evaluation and grading

4. Text and discourse as events

II. Scientific Precursors

1. Structuralism and linguistics

2, Physicalism and behaviorism

3. Mentalism and transformational grammar

III. The Procedural Approach

1. Designing a model

2. The phases of text production

3. The resources of text processing

IV. The Linearity of Text Production

1. Temporality versus spatiality

2. Seven principles of linearity

3. Linearity and the motives for punctuating

V. Writing vs. Spelling, Grammar, and Speech

1.  Spelling: Rules, regularities, or randomness?

2.  Grammar made operations

3.    Speaking versus writing

VI. Style, Stages, and Steps Toward Progress

1.   Style

2.   The stages of discourse

3.    Theory and practice: A common cause

References

The Context of Communication  

 A “SCIENCE” OF COMPOSITION?

  1.1 A “science” of composition may seem an unusual notion. Science is widely considered a specialized enterprise for making statements about stable entities and quantities. Webster’s well-known dictionary (1963: 771) defines “science” as “knowledge covering general truths, the operation of general laws,” and a sub-definition is: “one of the natural sciences” — the latter “dealing with objectively measurable phenomena” (1963: 653). These definitions embody the common belief that any domain hoping to be considered a legitimate “science” should emulate the natural sciences and their conceptions: laws, measurements, generality, and objectivity.

 1.2 Early science was rooted in the speculations and ideologies of philosophy, theology, and politics. Facts were established by assertion (cf. I.2.8.4), and accepted as an act of faith in the person or institution making the claim. Modern science strove toward a method where facts are established by empirical discovery and accepted as a conclusion drawn from evidence. However, these strivings have had some problematic side-effects. Scientists became skeptical about the responsibility of science to serve the interests of society at all. Research focused on direct manipulation of small scale objects in the laboratory and discounted their contexts in everyday life. Statements were mainly quantitative, rather than qualitative, because numbers allow neutral comparisons and generalizations more easily than characteristics do (cf. II..2.2). Individual objects were leveled into a statistic norm: the highest truth was equated with whatever occurs most often. In principle, however, the norm may be a theoretical construct not embodied in any one real object.

 1.3 In this ambience, the human sciences looked for domains that seemed well-structured. If necessary, domains were simplified and broken down via reduction and fragmentation. Static objects were stressed at the expense of dynamic events. Hence, scientists preferred to study artifacts rather than the processes whereby those artifacts are produced and used within human activities; and to treat orderly special cases as general cases or as metaphors for the latter. Contexts and processes — especially those involving human creativity — were widely believed to lack the orderly structure and uniformity required for valid scientific inquiry. In actual practice, the investigators themselves informally supplied these contexts and processes. Methods worked best when the artifacts could readily be fit into uniform contexts (cf. I.1.7). For example, linguistics analyzed the formal structure of words and sentences much better than that of meanings and purposes (cf. II.1; II.3).

 1.4 After a time, research of this kind must reach a point of diminishing returns, because a major part of the inquiry is hidden from view and thus hard to control. As long as scientists supply contexts without acknowledgement, the treatment of facts and evidence contains a concealed intermediate step that may endanger the consistency and reliability of the findings. The ideological and personal biases modern science strives to exclude might creep in at this very point. Such was the fate of the three scientific trends to be surveyed in Chapter II: structuralism, behaviorism, and mentalism. By discounting or fragmenting ordinary human processing, they failed to get any general picture of communication and cognition. This impasse can be resolved only if we agree that scientific principles are not compromised by seeking structures in processes, not just in artifacts. We can be more certain of what we know if we explore how we come to know it (I.1.8; III.1.32).

 1.5 Accordingly, the status of science has recently been re-examined along three dimensions: historical, philosophical, and psychological. Historical studies (e.g. Kuhn, 1970a) remind us how, in the past, ardently accepted facts collapsed despite the methodologies and institutions that favored them. Conversely, many facts we now take for granted once encountered protracted opposition from high-ranking scientists. The border-line between a “new discovery” and a “scientific mistake” is precariously negotiated. Science must be carefully maneuvered between the tendencies to explore and to ignore. If we bear in mind that any set of facts is in principle open to more than one explanation, and that no truth can be final, we will be more willing to consider new or competing approaches.

 1.6 Philosophical studies lead to a similar conclusion via a different route. A fundamental principle is currently in debate: the verification and falsification of theories (cf. Hanson, 1958; Feyerabend, 1970a; Lakatos, 1970; Popper, 1970, 1972; Stegmüller, 1976). The uncertainty of the dividing line between evidence and the interpretation of evidence has been recognized. Prevailing theory creates the categories in which scientists perceive and think, and thus decides what counts as evidence; a wholly impartial judgement is epistemologically not feasible. Contrary evidence that cannot be conceptualized within customary approaches tends to go unnoticed. Scholars who advance these considerations (e.g. Feyerabend, 1970b; Kuhn, 1970a, 1970b) have been attacked by defenders of the traditional status of science for portraying scientific communities as “irrational”¹ (cf. account in Stegmüller, 1976) [¹To the advocates of one theory, those of another naturally appear irrational, because coherence is being derived from two different frameworks. Creativity always entails a momentary disturbance of thought patterns, but is not irrational because it engenders a new order (cf. I.1.3; I.2.23.7; 1.3.7, 10)., i.e., as insensitive to contradictions and inconsistencies.² [For example, a vision program for a computer must incorporate knowledge about physical objects (dimension, location, displacement, edges, shadows, etc.) (cf. Winston [Ed.], 1975). Otherwise, the world looks like a jumble of lines and intensities capable of staggering numbers of interpretations.]  But a semblance of irrationality is a natural by-product of the scientific enterprise. As theories and explanations change or evolve, inconsistent or contradictory sets of facts sometimes persist side by side. Indeed, science deliberately fosters such a state of affairs by seeking out problems and anomalies. Scientists understandably maintain their allegiances at least until a new corpus of contrary evidence becomes relatively large and secure. The real dispute is how this evidence weighs against prior institutional or personal commitments, e.g. one’s investment in the older theory.

 1.7 Psychological studies endow the message of the historical and philosophical ones with a new urgency. Researchers concur that “in every domain of human experience, perception, comprehension, and interpretation involve an interaction of input with existing knowledge” (Anderson, 1977: 417). Everything humans can discover or know, except perhaps the experiences of very young children (cf. Piaget, 1976)¹, makes sense only via the mediation of our prior model of the world. What is true of humans at large is perforce true of scientists: there can be no absolute objectivity because there can be no totally unmediated access to an object. People agree about an object (and consider it objectively real) when they attain consistent and comparable processing results from encountering or using the object. Processing is therefore not chaotic; its profoundly ordered structuring helps to build the order of the world.

 1.8 The most pressing issue for science now is understanding understanding (cf. Rumelhart, 1981). Until we obtain a viable model of what it means to understand something, the credentials of science itself have no ultimate recourse.¹ [ Neisser (1982: 44) observes that psychoanalysis and behaviorism imply a self -contradiction because they would exempt themselves from human nature. “If all ideas are wish-fulfillment, then psychoanalytic ideas just express the wishes of the psychoanalyst. If every belief just results from conditioning, so does the behaviorist’s belief that this is the case.” Cognitive psychology, in contrast, is concerned with “how knowledge is possible,” and thus can deal with itself as one domain of human nature, rather than claiming to be a miraculous exception to its own scheme of things.] All essential constructs of science — discovery, objectivity, measurement, generalization, proof, etc. — are human processing acts we need to expound and explore (Neisser, 1982). The procedures of science should be analyzed in their interaction with commonsense reasoning (cf. Garfinkel, 1960; Cicourel, 1964; Jennings & Jennings, 1974). We can come closer to reality by examining the procedures whereby we constitute reality (I.1.3).

 1.9. We will do well to take seriously Tulving’s (1979: 29ff) admission that “all current ideas, interpretations, and theories are wrong, in the sense that sooner or later they will be modified or rejected.” Such a tenet need not damage our initiative and self-image. It might, on the contrary, incite us to contemplate unmapped terrains of discovery. And the imperative to question our answers (and even our questions) keeps us from failing into rigid habits of thinking. Tulving (1979: 29ff) himself draws some noteworthy consequences (cf. VI.3.19-28):

 1.9.1 It is unwise to expend too much effort on affirming accepted theories. Experiments should be designed not simply to shore up such theories, but also to show how they are still incomplete or inadequate.

 1.9.2 An account for the findings of a single experiment or type of experiment is not too valuable. We need models that include the larger context in which any activity is performed. Such models “will bring out relationships between experiments or sets of data that we would not otherwise have perceived” (Estes, 1975a: 271).

 1.9.3 Formalization should not be undertaken too early. Unwieldy constructs borrowed from mathematics and logic are out of place in domains where the basic concepts are still highly approximative. Such constructs give a false sense of security of having explained what has in fact only been rewritten in a formal language.

 1.9.4 Scientists should be more willing to reject accepted theories that no longer lead to new or enlightening findings. The exertions of repeatedly patching up faltering theories could be better invested in the search for new ones.

 1.10 The human sciences have both as their own foundation and as their object of inquiry the procedures of MODEL-BUILDING (cf. Beaugrande, 1980a, 1981a, 1981b). A MODEL can be defined as a theoretical  construct intended to represent the nature and workings of some object or object domain. As long as the domain is relatively unfamiliar, the model remains highly APPROXIMATIVE, i.e., contains provisional assumptions for which there is sparse evidence. Further experience and reflection can TUNE the model, i.e. bring it into steadily more reliable correspondence with the domain and provide more consistent, effectual orientation. A society or culture is defined both by its major models and by its customary procedures for building and tuning them. At one extreme, the model becomes totally internalized and invisible, seeming to be reality itself; at the other, people become aware of models inside models (build models of themselves building models, and so on indefinitely), in an infinite regress.¹ [¹”Infinite regress” is the philosophical and psychological consequence of the search for ultimate causality and definition. In everyday life, people set a threshold where they stop pursuing the causes or definitions of one artifact or operation in another, and accept things as given. In science, the hope lingers on that physiology and neurology might be the final cause of cognition and communication (cf. II.2.3ff). But since the causalities are discoverable only in terms of a complex process model, the latter cannot be strictly derived from physiological events and observations.] Either way, models remain pervasive and powerful determiners of how the world is viewed.

 1.11 A science will progress the most swiftly by remaining aware of its own model-building. Science has special demands for orientation: not only to experience a domain, but also to describe and explain it. A scientific community typically seeks high degrees of completeness, consistency, and exactness, whence the familiar conceptual apparatus — definitions, classifications, measurements, regularities, and the rest. There is no way to conclusively verify a model, because all possible evidence can never be assembled (cf. Popper, 1972); at most, the model can be falsified if it contradicts a significant body of evidence (cf. Lakatos, 1970). However, the standard methods of observing, experimenting, predicting, etc., are never completely free of the prior model that determines which answers are sought for which questions. The real danger is that constant application of a model can internalize and reinforce it to the point where it is considered identical with the domain itself. At that point, the model severely limits and obscures the negotiation of the threshold at which accruing contradictions overturn an established theory (cf. I.1.5).

 1.12 The priorities proposed in 1.9.2 suggest a way out of this basic predicament. The model can be DIVERSIFIED by applying it to a steadily wider domain or set of domains. Each step of diversification reexamines the accountability of the model. Of course, the model still influences discovery procedures and leads scientists to incorporate their prior assumptions into their treatment of evidence. But these effects are structurally and functionally altered by each step of diversification. The model must account not for just one concern, but for a growing intersection of  concerns. The probability steadily rises that an inadequately designed model will lose its plausibility. Diversification should be based on ANTECEDENCE: the procedure of progressively specifying a general theory to create sub-theories for several domains. Research in any one of these domains can then be related to the others via an explicit shared conceptual framework. For example, a theory of communication and cognition is properly antecedent to a theory of text production, and the latter in turn antecedent to a theory of writing. In contrast, EXTRAPOLATION entails borrowing notions, methods, accounts, etc., from a “source” domain and transferring them to a “goal” domain without any such overarching framework. Normally, extrapolation occurs because the concepts and procedures of the source domain are better defined and operationalized than those of the goal domain. On occasion, the unexploredness of the goal domain can preclude a critical evaluation of whether the transfer is theoretically justifiable, and not just convenient. There may be no more than a metaphoric similarity between the domains, so that the well-defined source domain says very little about the precise nature of the goal domain (cf. I.1.3; II.1.2.15, 24; II.3.9; III.2.1). 1.13 The context for a “science of composition” should therefore be established through antecedence. As a sub-domain in a theory of text production (including speaking), composition is necessarily subject to the general conditions of cognition and communication. Texts are produced through complex operations that are guided by available processing resources, such as memory, attention, motor control, feedback, and motivation. These conditions in turn affect the practical applications through which theory and research on text production fulfills its responsibility to society (cf. VI.3). By exploring situations where text production is a relevant human action, we can better support the skills of communication in general and of literacy in particular. As a social institution, literacy promotes complex model-building, both collective (social, historical, scientific, technological, etc.) and individual (introspective, immediate, etc.). Scientists and writers alike use approximations and tests to steadily narrow down the disparity between intention vs. action, knowledge vs. expression. Thus, understanding the origin and production of discourse can bring new foundations not only for language instruction, but also for a general epistemology of discovering and communicating knowledge.

 1. 14 The importance of establishing antecedence relationships among adjacent disciplines is now widely recognized. The fragmentation of theory and research so common in the past (I.1.3) is yielding to unification and interdisciplinarity. Still, the legacy of previous research can serve us in the larger enterprises of the future. Chapter II surveys three scientific precursors that approached language or language activities via some degree of extrapolation. Structuralism was based on the notion of analysing objects into minimal components, as practised in the natural sciences (II. 1). {7} Behaviorism centered upon the notion of conditioning, as established in animal testing (II.2). Mentalism centered on the notion of axiomatic systems, as conceived in formal logic (II.3). In each case, the application of these notions to human language was sometimes contestable, reductive, or misleading. However, many of the issues then raised still remain valid for any theory of language or communication, provided we find a unifying mode of stating and pursuing them.

 1.15 Though composition itself is cannot be a science, it constitutes a rich domain for scientific inquiry into human processing. This volume is intended to outline a provisional research program such a science might profitably pursue. In so early a state, approximations and limitations cannot be avoided (cf. I.4.17; VI.3.25). For the time being, qualitative discovery seems more vital than quantitative (cf. I.1.2; 1. I.9.3; I.4.17; VI.3.22). We need to clarify the terrain before exact measurements and formalizations are likely to become decisive. We also need to determine how the detailed factors of text processing can be classified and described in relation to the whole. Finally, we should not forget that the conviction carried by a theory or a model ultimately depends on what Ulric Neisser (1976: 7f) calls its ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY (III.1.31.8): cognition and communication as they “occur in the ordinary environment and in the context of natural purposeful activity!”  

2. LITERACY: CRITIQUE OF A CRISIS

  2.1 In spite of educational training in schools and professions, only a small portion of human abilities and resources are tapped in everyday life. Traditionally, the learners themselves, rather than the educational approaches, have been blamed for limitations and failures. The learners, it was argued, were inherently incapable of better performance, due to factors like “genetic endowment” and “intelligence quotient” (I.3.2). Quite conceivably, however, a fundamentally different educational approach could greatly reduce the ratio of failure schools now accept as normal and necessary (cf. Combs, 1979; Marks, 1982). Barring cases of actual brain damage, every child could acquirefrom schooling a sufficient level of knowledge and skill to understand and control his or her natural life (cf. Bruner, 1966). All we have proven so far is that current schooling does not attain this result.

 2.2 The so-called “literacy crisis” may thus be a result of educational policy, not just a barrier to the latter’s projects. On the one hand, the crisis is illusory, resulting less from a decline in skills than from a profound change in the fabric of society and its cultural expectations. Educational opportunities have been extended for the first time to disadvantaged social groups who contribute a nontraditional population of learners (Roeche & Kirk, 1973; Cross, 1974). These students don’t share the hidden preconditions built into curricular domains such as literacy. Formerly, English teachers {8} “assumed a cultural trust, a vast body of unspoken but shared routines and information, which freed them from the need to explain what they were up to” (Shaughnessy, 1976: 153). Now that students are no longer attuned to the older goals and methods, teachers readily misconstrue the emergence of diverse backgrounds and dialects as a sudden decline in student potential.

 2.3 On the other hand, the crisis is genuine to the extent that current patterns of social activity in America include literate concerns less prominently than before. By temporarily isolating a person from the group, reading and writing may engender anxieties (cf. I.2.10). Participation in mass media, despite a widespread lack of intellectual challenge, seems to promise social integration and divert attention from one’s own problems. Reading and writing are essentially active and creative, whereas mass media encourage passive, reactive attitudes. The latter experiences could leave one’s processing capacities underdeveloped, so that literate activities would demand an uncomfortable strain. For example, the camera perspective and sound track of filmic media pre-empt the tasks of deciding what is noteworthy or significant in the totality of a scene or event. The visual and acoustic impact of a film can overpower its conceptual organization.¹ [Marshall McLuhan (personal communication) suggested that media impact may alter cognition so radically that literacy is becoming no longer feasible. But his argument, based on the dominance of brain hemispheres (cf. II.2.3ff), failed to consider the adaptability of cognition to new conditions.] Carolyn Stopher, one of my students at the University of Florida, interviewed her dorm-mates immediately after a TV news show. They could report vivid sights and sounds, but couldn’t give any coherent account of whole events and their significance.

 2.4 In another, less publicized, sense, the literacy crisis is genuine because a literacy deficit is a serious obstacle to personal and social advancement. Few people can dispense with literate skills and still have equal opportunities for a successful career in schooling and in later life. A literacy failure is not just a low grade on somebody’s curve, a numerical abstraction to be shrugged off by teacher and pupil alike. It is a tragic waste of human potential to be combatted with every resource available to our social institutions of development and advancement. The denial of literacy is a denial of freedom.² Historical evidence for this denial is the fact that teaching slaves to read or write was punishable by law in the American South before the Civil War.]

 2.5 Just as I do not believe educational failure is either normal or necessary (I.2.1), I cannot take the failure statistics of literacy education as proof that the skills involved are simply too hard for the contemporary learner (cf. I.2.23 1). Appropriately designed methods can provide a workable level of literacy to many children now denied that privilege. The key is to understand, expound, and train the requisite skills, instead of just assuming that {9} they are obvious to everybody with the right social background (cf. I.2.2). Failure should be limited to cases where the learner actively opposes the educational process and refuses to participate. I suspect that such a defiant stance is likely only when learners emphatically doubt that a method can lead to success. If a task is explicit and realistic, learners will exert themselves far more intensely than if it is vague and elusive (I.3.27). The latter description often applies to the task of writing as posed in schools and colleges (I.2.17).

 2.6 Non-traditional learners frequently suffer severe neglect of their literacy skills throughout their schooling. If prevailing methods presuppose a literate background, rather than being effectually able to instill it, then non-literate students are hardly likely to make much headway. Lacking an exact notion of the human processes that constitute literacy skills, educators are badly equipped to observe a child’s progress and diagnose or relieve ongoing obstacles. Somewhere during the developmental process, a learner may adopt a non-strategic language model that blocks further evolution (III.1.8), and may emerge barely literate after twelve years of public schooling. To prevent such an impasse, a science of composition must define those processes and skills clearly enough to provide a more generally applicable approach (V1.3).

 2.7 Sociologically, literacy is a key factor in a whole complex of personal attitudes about human status and values. People are hastily judged by any evidence they present for their literate abilities. Many social and professional opportunities are routinely made difficult or unavailable to people who elicit negative judgements. A particular dialect can mean that a child is expected to fail in school; or that an adult will not be trusted to perform properly on a responsible job. Otherwise enlightened citizens, even educators, misconstrue variations in literacy as marks of low intelligence and ability (I.2.17, 20).¹ [Tom Wolfe (1969a: 117) remarked of a young woman: “But underneath all the ‘gits’ and ‘gonna’s’ she turned out to be probably the brightest girl around there” — as if dialect should normally accompany low intelligence. A survey my student Gerald Langford conducted among rural Florida English teachers showed how they are led by the frequency of dialect-related errors in punctuation, spelling, or sentence grammar to predict that Black children whose home dialects are largely oral will be low achievers.

 2.8 The first step is to analyze the factors that influence literacy judgements. Figure I offers a provisional classification of the parameters along which a person might be rated.  

   2.8.1 Usage: Standard vs. non-standard. The most popular evidence for literacy ratings comes from variations in grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. Simple errors, e.g. misspellings, are classed together with well-known markers of non-prestigious dialects, e.g. unusual noun plurals or verb tenses. Self-proclaimed language authorities, with no credentials in serious research, assert the “correctness” of their own usage and aggressively denounce anyone who disagrees (cf. I.2.1 1).

   2.8.2 Access: active vs. passive. “Access” decides the correlation between one’s skills or knowledge and one’s actual performance (cf. I.3.4, 22, 25; II.2.10., III.1.19; III.3.2.2; IV.1.12, IV.2 48; V.1.14f, 36, 40, 48; V2.16; V.3.3, 22ff). Active skills are applied on one’s own initiative; passive skills require activation from outside and thus, depending on conditions, may not be manifested in performance. The psychology of memory has shown that active recall can handle much less than passive recognition (III.3.5.4). Converting passive to active access is a pressing but poorly explored issue in developmental education, e.g. how to bring words from passive to active vocabulary.

2.8.3 Fluency: Fluent vs. hesitant. “Fluency” can denote the rate at which a task is carried out and the smoothness of transitions between successive steps (cf. II.2.5, 28f; II.3.21, 38; IV.2.14, 29, 32, 34; VI.3.12). In spoken text production, fluency depends somewhat on articulateness, i.e. case of producing spoken sounds; but deeper factors like fluent planning and ideation also contribute (cf. III.2.6ff; IV2.14-34). Fluency supports efficiency: the processing of the current text with the least amount of effort (I.4. 10). Fluency may be crucial for personal goals: Wodak (1 980) observed that Viennese courtroom judges, keenly sensitive to the literacy of defendants, believe a fluent report of an incident far more readily than a hesitant one. {11}

 2.8.4 Effectiveness: Success vs. failure. “Effectiveness” can designate the extent to which a text contributes to one’s chances of obtaining a discourse goal (I.4.10). One contributor to effective text production is assertiveness, i.e. presenting one’s materials as true, authoritative, and safe from challenge (cf. I.1.2; 1.2.12, 16.3; VI.1.1; VI.3.25). Another is audience sensitivity: awareness of how text receivers will react (cf. III.1.5; III.2.13; IV2.19.15ff; VI.I.17; VI.2.1; VI.3.12).                            

 2.8.5 Adaptability: Flexible vs. rigid. “Adaptability” is the extent to which text production is tailored to the specific setting and audience. Audiences notice particular style markers (V1.1.4) and respond negatively if the style seems too plain (commonplace, intimate, slangy, etc.) or too elaborated (rare, remote, elevated, etc.) for the occasion. Many items of usage are neutral enough to escape notice, e.g., Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1972: 24) example, ‘The student’s work is now much better and seems likely to go on improving’.1 [1. I place all linguistic samples in single quotes.]

 2.8.6 Voice: Unique vs. average. “Voice” can denote the extent to which text production reveals the peculiar individuality of the producer, as opposed to the habits of the whole language community (cf. I.2.16.6; 1.4.8; II.2.28; II.3.44; III.3.10; VI.I.7, 9; VI.3.13). Though each text is normally unique in itself, there are differences of degree and markedness. A text producer with a distinctive voice typically requires from audiences a perceptibly high processing effort by frequently overturning common expectations.
 2.8.7 Participation: Voluntary vs. compulsory. Participation in literate activities may depend entirely on free choice, e.g. reading a novel for entertainment or writing poetry to express oneself. Or, people may be forced to participate against their will, e.g., in some school settings. In between is the range where literate activities are instrumental for some further goal, as in many professions. In some societies, free participation is more prestigious than instrumental. For example, a government official who reads and writes a large number of letters may not be judged as literate as a literary book club president who actually addresses a lesser volume of written materials.

 2.8.8 Domain knowledge: Expertise vs. ignorance. Simply knowing more about the knowledge domain used as a text topic creates the impression of being more literate. There will be easier access, larger and more precise active vocabulary, and often more assertiveness and fluency. Ignorance of the domain, on the other hand, creates the opposite impression.

 2.9 The eight parameters outlined here, though doubtless not complete, should suggest the diversity and complexity of judging literacy. Many of the skills entailed are not just concerns of language, nor are they open to conscious control during text production. Access hinges on capacities for{12} organizing and searching memory, which are hard processes to direct (cf. III.2.24; III.3.10ff; IV.2.11, 27). Fluency depends in part upon individual or biological rhythms of the organism (cf. IV.1.4; IV.2.19.7). Effectiveness is influenced by social beliefs about what goals are desirable (cf. III.2.7). Adaptability is determined by one’s background of experience and practice. Participation may be sporadic or accidental. Knowledge or ignorance of a domain is an accident of one’s training. Thus, literacy judgements have a complex origin utterly belied by the hasty, superficial ways they are often formed.

 2.10 This complexity has two important consequences. The first is that many people suffer from language anxiety because they feel they are being judged by complicated, unexplained standards. Within a very limited range, anxiety is productive in heightening attention and effort; after that, it heavily drains the resources that should properly go to the task itself (Murray, 1971). Anxiety makes the situation appear “difficult, challenging, and threatening”; “the individual sees himself as ineffective, or inadequate, in handling the task,” and “focuses on undesirable consequences” (Sarason, 1980: 6). Hence, anxiety interferes with performance and brings about the negative results the person fears and expects. Anxious attitudes toward literacy commonly impede learning and lead students to predict and accept failure as the natural outcome.^{1 [}Daly’s (1977) work on “apprehension” would be more helpful if it took account of the large, important literature on anxiety (cf. Sarason [Ed.], 1980). Daly’s “apprehension” appears to be a sub-type, namely anxiety before the act, as indicated in the person’s own judgement.]

 2. 11 The second consequence is that “authorities on usage” disdain unbiased empirical discovery and rational argument in favor of bald assertions about “correctness.” Discussions of writing (e.g. handbooks on style and composition) freely mix general strategies, such as removing ambiguities and needless wordage, with the authors’ personal and social biases. Strunk and White (1979) weaken their reasonable advocacy of precision, clarity, and brevity (e.g., “keep related words together,” “omit needless words”) with a flurry of fussy distinctions (e.g., ‘compare to’ vs. ‘compare with’, ‘due to’ vs. ‘owing to’, ‘shall’ vs. ‘will’, ‘while’ vs. ‘although’) and petty dislikes (e.g., ‘anticipate’, ‘contact’, ‘currently’, ‘hopefully’). Whatever the authors don’t care for is stigmatized as “incorrect/wrong,” “awkward,” “loose,” “silly,” “absurd,” or “annoying”; writers who don’t agree are called “indiscriminate” and “illiterate” promulgators of “vulgarisms” and “abominations” (1979: 42-63). Similarly, other “authorities” — Richard Grant White, Jacques Barzun, Wilson Follett — denounce anyone who rejects staid prejudices and advocates language tolerance as a deranged anarchist scheming to bring doomsday upon us all (cf. survey in Finegan, 1980).. {13} The real goal of these polemics (aside from grabbing attention)¹ [Edwin Newman’s smug (1973) book simply uses literacy problems as a pretext to parade the travels and prominent acquaintances of its own author. Many of his anecdotes have little bearing on usage.] is to intimidate any counter-forces of language change or dialect proliferation that might endanger cultural elitism. The metaphors for adopting new usage are revealingly political (“sabotage,” “guerilla war”), legalistic (“infractions of rules”), social (“slumming,” “folksy”), moralist (“loose,” “perverse,” corruptions,” “sins”), and racist (“crossbreeding parts of speech”) (Follett, 1962: 74ff; Strunk & White, 1979: 45, 47, 52, 77, 81f). If public opinion agrees with the authority, it is praised as “logic,” “common sense,” or “established,” “modern,” and “preferred usage”; if not, it is damned as the popularity “ that will make language “as chaotic as a ball game with no foul lines” (Strunk & White, 1979: 44, 52, 57); or “a confusion of unchanneled, incalculable willawaws” (Follett, 1962: 75). The elitist undercurrent is usually concealed — after all, one must “not inject opinion into a piece of writing” (Strunk & White, 1979: 80) — but breaks forth when the general audience is abandoned as the final adjudicator. After decrying usage that makes readers “impatient or confused” and “wastes their time,” Strunk and White (1979: 78, 81, 85) abruptly decree that 

the writer [should] sympathize with the reader’s plight [...] but never seek to know his [sic] wants. The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself [sic],²[Mr. While is adamant that sexist language has ceased to be so, thanks to long use; he condemns as “boring,” “silly,” “nonsensical,” and “diffuse” both ‘he or she’ and ‘they’ as pronouns for indefinite persons; for him, anyway, the “writer” is “a man” (Strunk & White, 1979; 60f, 84).] and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

 Yet most bad prose comes precisely from writers who rank their own mannerisms and convenience over the readers’ (cf. III.3.16; VI.1.25ff). 2.12 Such popular handbooks have had a wide impact.³ [The back-cover blurb on Strunk and White claims an stomach-turning sale of two million copies.] Their mode of dictating usage sets a bad precedent for society and the schools: accepting the welcome evidence from usage and public standards, and ignoring or vilifying the unwelcome. Correct usage is determined by decree and assertiveness. The average learner is rendered anxious and insecure by authoritarian attitudes, yet has no rational grounds for making decisions, because the promulgation of personal biases prevents a clear, workable consensus. Learning cannot be cumulative if every teacher legislates a new set of “correct” options (V1.3.2). Students must adapt to each new rule-set until they doubt the validity and rationality of any language judgements. Even beyond spelling, punctuation, and grammar, superstition holds that every language choice is either “right” or “wrong,” though the standards of rightness may  {14} never be clearly explained. To appear less vulnerable, many people react as defensively and violently as the “authorities” when their usage is questioned. Some composition students take all criticism of their writing as degrading and offensive, and desperately fight against change (cf. I.3.12, 15, I 9).

 2.13 This state of affairs is part of a pervasive educational attitude we can call the right/wrong dichotomy. Politicians and philosophers have traditionally advertised their views as the “truth” whose acceptance was more a matter of moral rectitude than of dispassionately weighing the evidence (I. 1.2). Dissenters are given the same vigorous flailing as the advocates of language tolerance and change (I.2.1 1). Science tends in the same direction to the extent that it ignores its own contexts (cf. I.1.2; 1.2.23.9; VI.3.21). Education has accordingly been set up as a relentless recitation of “right answers,” rather than as a forum for acquiring powerful, self-reliant strategies to devise, assess, and de-bug answers (Papert, 1980). If necessary, educational domains are fragmented, reduced, or distorted to maintain the dichotomy of right vs. wrong, and the simple, mechanical grading it enables. “Facts” are learned like mad, but not integrated into a meaningful framework (I.3.6). Literature, a domain that thrives on freedom of thought and expression (V1.1.7f), is studied as a endless drill on quotations, plots, or authors’ biographies. Composition, a domain for finding one’s own voice and taking stock of one’s knowledge (I.2.8.8; I.2.23.5), is disfigured as a self-conscious exercise in adhering to “rules”; monitoring the surface text becomes more important than delivering a purposeful message.

 2.14 A survey of several hundred freshman writers at my university turned up a veritable class menagerie of “rules” from previous English teachers (cf. VI.I. 12, 15). Some of the reported rules forbid the use of major options, such as opinions, adverbs, contractions, first and second person, the passive, the verb ‘to be’, quotations at the end of a paragraph, and questions in an argumentative essay. Other rules outlaw more specific options. No sentence can begin with ‘there’, ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘because’, or any conjunction or preposition.” No sentence can end with ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘to’, or a preposition.¹ [Like split infinitives, clause-final prepositions were outlawed because Latin, traditionally the language whose grammar served for other languages, doesn’t have them (cf. Postman & Weingartner, 1966: 47]. The blacklist of individual expressions included the transition words ‘however’, ‘too’, ‘in addition’, ‘furthermore’, ‘like’, and ‘because’; plus hedges and qualifiers, such as ‘perhaps’, ‘in my opinion’, ‘hopefully’, ‘anyway’, ‘a lot’, ‘a little’, ‘very’, and ‘really’. Still other “rules” prescribed numbers. A paragraph must have at least three sentences, and not more than five (cf. VI.I.15). No sentence may contain more than 30 words, and no paragraph more than 150 words. A high-school teacher in Indiana decreed that every research paper must have exactly 15 pages, {23}because that number was the average he had received in previous years.

 2.15 The origins of these rules are complex and diverse. Some rules reflect a helpless search for order and uniformity in a seeming chaos of choices and varieties. Some combat presumed markers of verbosity, obscurity, and pretense. Some are taken uncritically from old handbooks like Strunk and White (e.g. no opinions!) (I.2. 11).¹¹ Some are violent reactions banning language items that happen to get misused or overused — a response as simplistic and disastrous as the Biblical admonition to tear out an eye that offends you (Matthew 18:9; Mark 9:47). Some discriminate against conversational speech, or against particular dialects (I.2.7f; 1.2.23.4). Some simply make grading easier by sorting out the right from the wrong (I.3.14; VI.I. 15). Since these motivations are such a mixture of good intent, convenience, helplessness, and misinformation, the rules themselves are not likely to be consistently or rationally defended. Like the “authorities” on usage, teachers have the institutional leverage to legislate rules and to stigmatize people who deviate. Putting all injunctions in the same category of “good usage” creates a facade of unity and respectability to ward off challenges against any particular rule.

 2.16 The disadvantages of the rules must therefore be made clear. Objections can be raised on the grounds that the “rules” are:

 2.16.1 Incomplete. The rules add up to an oddly tattered patchwork whose gaps are greater than its fabric. For example, conjunctions are evaluated for some positions, but not for others.

 2.16.2 Inaccurate. The rules misrepresent what is demonstrably true of skilled writing, e.g. the dimensions of the paragraph. My students from Mimi were unable to discover in essay collections a single example that followed the formula their high school teachers had stringently required (I.2.14; VI. 1. 15).

 2.16.3 Authoritarian. Lacking a basis in observable usage, many rules merely embody personal biases. Bald assertiveness is considered just as respectable a basis for rules as serious research (cf. I.2.1lff; VI.3.25).

 2.16.4 Inconsistent. Some rules seem valid only for a single textbook or teacher: moving to a new class may mean unlearning them and learning a new set, lest the old ones lead to “errors” (I.2.12). Textbook authors may set down a rule and then ignore it in their own writing (even on the same page) (cf. VI.I.22). Learners conclude that the rules are arbitrary, and the compulsion to obey them unfairly distributed.

 2.16.5 Restrictive. The rule declares one option to be the only one, or misjudges a special case to be the general one. Motivations for individual contexts don’t come into view. The decision-making capacities for self-reliant use of varied writing options cannot be learned (1.2.12; cf. Youdelman, 1978).

2.16.6 Negative. The rules are mostly cast as “don’ts,” telling writers only what not to do. Such advice does not help writers decide what should be done, and evokes strong inhibitions. In consequence, students fear experimentation and creativity as traps leading to “errors.” No attempts are made to develop a personal voice (cf. 1.2.8.6). 2.16.7 Unworkable. Many rules are defined so vaguely that only a proficient writer could apply them. An example cited by Robert Gorrell (1965: 141) is “never include more than one thought in a sentence”; naive students have no criteria to identify thoughts or determine their borderlines. Sometimes, two rules collide and leave the writer no way out, such as simultaneous proscription of both first person and passive (cf. VI.I.22; Harris, 1979). 

2.16.8 Discriminatory. Many rules stigmatize specific features of minority dialects (cf. 1.2.7; 1.2.23.4). Justifications, if provided at all, usually conceal this striving behind some argument about logic or clarity. For instance, double negatives, a prominent feature of Black English (Scott, 1979), are attacked on the empirically false premise that they produce not an emphatic negative, but a positive (cf. IV2.55). 2.17 The effects of the rules can be considered next. First, accurate, comprehensive surveys of current usage (e.g. Quirk et al., 1972) are overlooked, and the regional, social, and personal variations they reveal are discounted. Second, by misrepresenting actual usage and undermining the credibility of composition programs, the rules impede learning more than they support it. Untrained writers misunderstand any advice as a strict rule (Rose, 1981). They get caught between conflicting rules (Harris, 1979). They invest great ingenuity and intelligence in the struggle to follow or devise arcane rules, and make errors that are ironically construed as signs of inability and unintelligence. (Shaughnessy, 1977; Bartholomae, 1980). And they may strain to follow rules until they get “writer’s block” (Rose, 1980). In such situations, trying out new skills seems too risky and frustrating to be worthwhile (1.2.23.3; 1.3.8, 22). The red marks on papers “are not attuned to the approximate ‘rightness’ of what the student has written, but rather to the absolute wrongness of the composition”; they “make no attempt to tell the student to what extent his writing begins to approximate acceptable English and rhetorical effectiveness” (Zoellner, 1969: 280). Writing loses all purpose, enjoyment, or personality, and turns into a tedious, mystifying ritual, game, or tightrope act. The tremendous concentration on minor “errors” obscures the students’ ability to implement major strategies. Eventually, students give up on literacy, like passengers abandoning a ship that sinks while the architect corrects the dining room clock on the Titanic.
   2.18 In many ways, literacy educators and composition teachers are caught in an acute dilemma (cf. 1.3.13; 111.3.30; IV.3.45; V.1.40; V2.3, 31; VI.I.9, 13; VI.3.2). {17} They teach effective, self-reliant writing in a society that expects them to embody and enact its diverse, inconsistent, and irrational language attitudes. Teachers may indeed be forced by parents or schoolboards to uphold odd standards of usage. Teachers who adopt an enlightened, tolerant stance on usage risk being denounced as irresponsible, dangerous saboteurs trampling on all standards (1.2.11) — intense diatribes are good for concealing indefensible, inaccurate views. Similar biases live on in textbooks, because publishers don’t want to offend those who decide what schools will buy, whether or not any expertise on language or writing influences the selection (VI.3.26).

        2.19 The solution to the dilemma will not be easy: extensive research to situate rules and errors in their proper social and psychological contexts (cf. I.3.8, 14). From a social perspective, we might probe public attitudes, self-images, writers’ anticipations of success or failure, prestige of dialects, and the literacy judgements discussed in 1.2.8. In their attempts to prevent language change and to uphold cultural supremacy, authorities on usage pick out far more “rules” and “errors” than are socially relevant, and may even disregard them in their own texts (cf. 1.2.16.4). Socially relevant, on the other hand, are usages that elicit judgements about a writer: obvious mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and grammar; unwittingly bizarre word choices; unintentional humor; ineptly pretentious verbiage; and so on. Students should learn about social consequences of usage, but not in composition courses that act as “laboratory sessions on linguistic and social conformity” (Larson, 1972: 635), or “maneuver students to internalize failure” (Kampf & Lauter, 1973: 23). Teachers should help students appreciate social pressures, but should not be arbitrary, unthinking enforcers of those pressures (V.2.31; VI.I.9, 13ff; VI.3.25). Teachers need to clarify public attitudes and work to make them more tolerant (Gere & Smith, 1979; VI. 1. 27).

 2.20 From a psychological perspective, we must explore the processes of producing and receiving texts to determine what advice would genuinely improve written communication. Procedurally, a RULE is a regularity to be observed unless the writer has a good motivation not to; and an ERROR is an occurrence which consumes processing resources unnecessarily by an unmotivated departure from such a regularity. The system of text production is so complicated and extensive that it is naturally prone to limitations and dysfunctions, such as processing overload  Errors are a normal side-product, not proof of low ability or intelligence. Writers merely need proper “debugging” techniques: methods for expecting errors and reacting strategically. Learning improves best by monitoring one’s own performance and applying the feedback (cf. III.3.2.2). Teacher-performed correction is not only unreasonably time-consuming, but also discourages students from learning to find and remedy errors on their own (V1.3.17).

 2.21 Research on rules and errors can be productive within the larger framework of an antecedent theory of communication and cognition {18} (I.1.12f). The standards of good writing can only be stated and defended in terms of the actions and interactions of writers and readers. Students need active, positive advice, not inhibiting prescriptions. If we shift our emphasis from the written artifact over to processing actions, we will come to understand the motives for our advice and evaluations (cf. VI.3). We can also clarify basic questions such as the order in which course materials are presented and tasks are carried out. For example, demanding a complete, well-written essay at the outset of a course violates the principles of learning psychology by taking “the most difficult part of the problem first” (Kintsch, 1977: 402). Success is more likely if students begin from their current abilities and edit their successive approximations into a finished product, stage by stage (cf. III. 1.26; V 3.40). Non-traditional students have a particular need for manageable sub-tasks (Roueche & Kirk, 1973: 68).

 2.22 Such research is all the more pressing at a time when both society and the schools are re-appraising their notions about literacy education. The “back-to-the-basics” movement, a signal of disenchantment with recent methods, can hardly help out unless we identify the truly basic skills: model-building, problem-solving, search, hypothesis-testing, resource distribution, and so forth (cf. Beaugrande, 1980a: 278f; VI.3.28). Rote memorization, repetitive practice, and authoritarian discipline are not “basic,” but simply ineffectual and alienating. Learning requires a cognitive reorganization of knowledge or skills to attain a more strategic design (cf. III. 1.28). Mere repetition is as likely as not to reinforce a non-strategic tactic and block off further learning altogether.

 2.23 The disappointing results of composition classes are occasionally explained by recourse to popular myths about educational potential (compare Combs, 1979). These myths are still strong enough that it is worthwhile to analyze the fallacies involved. For the sake of discussion, I will render each myth as a statement:

 2.23.1 “College students today are less intelligent and capable (or lazier) than in the past.” This myth is propagated in courses where traditional methods no longer work. Students who flunk composition often do well in such fields as computer science and chemistry whose complexity has greatly increased over the past. The problem is not lower potential, but a new diversity in background, expectations, and aspirations (I.2.2). For example, nontraditional students raise stronger demands that coursework be clearly relevant to a future career (Cross, 1974: 87). Early schooling (with its fixation on odd rules and mysterious errors) has led students to suppose that the effort expended on writing will not pay off, so that exertions are futile (cf. I.2.17).

 2.23.2 “College-age students have already completed their language acquisition before arriving in college, and major changes are no longer possible.” This myth was inspired by certain views on developmental learning. Schmidt (1975: 257) reports the view that “most of motor learning occurs in {19} children and that adult learning is merely a recombination of old habits.” Ausubel (1967: 307) reports the view that certain developments are possible only during “critical periods” and, if missed, must lead to “retardation.” Such claims reflect an unduly narrow and literal interpretation of findings on physiology, neurology, and maturation. Normal development is misunderstood not as the average (what most organisms do), but as the limits of the possible (the only thing that all organisms can do). Failure of an educational program is blamed on the hard-wiring of the human brain (cf. I.3.2; II.2.3ff). The best refutation is that many people do continue to learn language throughout their lifetime, and that developmental programs such as Mina Shaughnessy’s do bring about major changes in student performance.

 2.23.3 Still, cognitive and motor organization becomes steadily more complex throughout childhood, adolescence, and maturity, and thus harder to reorganize on any large scale, especially automatic actions (III.1.21). If some stage within this progressive organization should be mismanaged, or avoided as dangerous risk (I.2.16.6, 17; 1.3.8, 22), the later stages that presuppose it would be set up and learned in entrenched non-strategic modes (II.3.31). Repetitive practice would only make students fall further and further behind, and perhaps be barely literate at the end of high school (I.2.6). Properly designed training could preclude such a cycle by explicitly addressing the cognitive and motor reorganization as it progresses.

 2.23.4 Another source of this myth may be the attempts of some schools to stamp out student dialects. Dennis Baron (1975: 176) depicts the strange ideology of that crusade: “Those who would eradicate non-standard speech and writing operate under the delusion of a white man’s burden of absolute cultural supremacy. ‘Proper’ usage is seen as the outward sign of grace, while non-standard usage is regarded as evidence of physical and moral decay.” Though few teachers hold such extreme views today, some still misunderstand dialect features as indicators of mental limitations (I.2.7). Bereiter and Engelmann (1966: 39), not finding in the speech of Black children the categories of middle-class White English, argued that the children suffered from “a total lack of ability to use language as a device for acquiring and processing information.” Linguistic forms were used as evidence. “The speech of the severely deprived children seems to consist not of distinct words, as does the speech of middle-class children of the same age, but rather of whole phrases or sentences that function like giant words. That is to say, these ‘giant words’ cannot be taken apart by the child and recombined […]. The child’s pronunciation arises from his inability to deal with sentences as sequences of meaningful parts” (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966: 34ff). If this view were accurate, then all speakers of Aymara, an Amerindian language centered in Peru and Bolivia, should also process no information. Aymara creates utterances as single long words, e.g. ‘Aruskipasipxañanakasakipunirakïspawa’, meaning, ‘I know it is desirable and necessary that all of us, including you also, keep communicating’ [data from Martha Hardman of the University of Florida]  Bereiter and Engelmann’s good intentions and sincerely helpful remediation programs were hampered by naively assuming the categories and differentiations of their own language and dialect to be privileged prerequisites of communication and cognition. The alternatives, e.g., using intonation and non-verbal signals instead of grammar, were not properly considered (cf. V.3.27).]

 2.23.5 “Composition is not a useful skill in today’s society.” The fallacy here is to overlook the importance of university training as a way to acquire cognitive processing strategies, not just a heap of facts. Writing offers the greatest opportunity for taking stock of and fitting together one’s knowledge (cf. Berthoff, 1972; Elbow, 1973; Lemke, 1974; Emigg 1977; Nystrand, 1977; Nystrand & Widerspiel, 1977; Olson, 1977a; Cooper & Matsuhashi, 1978; Murray, 1978; Irmscher, 1979b; Bereiter, 1980; Macrorie, 1980; Odell, 1980; Wason, 1980; Applebee, 1982; Shanklin, 1982; cf. 1.3.17; III.3.42; IV2.33; V.3.10, 15, 31). Literacy was therefore a major contributor to the evolution of social complexity and technology (I.1.13). Everyday speech is less adapted to assembling and reworking large-scale messages, or to preserving them for future consultation. Thus, most skilled professions in literate cultures demand writing abilities (Faigley, Miller, Meyer, & Witte, 1981).

 2.23.6 Writing might seem unimportant because university curricula neglect it. A national survey directed by Arthur Applebee (1981, 1982) learned that writing takes up 41 % of class time in English, and 48 % in the sciences, but mostly in short-answers, fill-in-the-blanks, or multiple-choice tests, where “right” and “wrong” answers are easy to grade (cf. I.2.13). Only 10% or less of class time is spent on composing extended texts, whose diverse, individual formats are harder to grade, though showing more reliably whether knowledge has been integrated and digested. 2.23.7 “Composing is an art, a special talent, and cannot be taught.” Steinberg (1980: 156) recalls “the romantic model”: “that truly creative writing is mysterious and non-rational, the result, ultimately, of inviting the muse rather than of employing consciously an ordered, rational process.” This myth probably stems from the origins of creativity, which begins by de-stabilizing everyday beliefs, questioning the obvious, or placing old bits of knowledge into new patterns (cf. I.3.10; III.2.15; Ghiselin, 1975: 357f). Until a new configuration of meaning falls into place, its inconsistencies resemble those typically found in irrational reasoning (III.3.15). But whereas irrationality preserves or perpetuates inconsistencies, creativity brings forth an insightful new order. Writing is therefore essentially orderly in its outcome, despite intermediary transitions in cognitive organization.

 2.23.8 “Non-traditional students lack the potential for academic success”. {21} This myth arose when non-traditional students found little help in “remedial” programs that merely rehearsed the tasks of traditional schooling all over again. But if their needs are met, non-traditional students can do as well as anyone else (cf. I.2.1). Educational research points up the importance of tailoring the school to the learner (cf. Hunt, 1972; Gordon, 1979; I2.21; II.2.32.4; V..8; VI.I.33ff; VI.2.26; VI.3.14), for example, allowing variable time for acquiring or performing a task (cf. Carroll, 1963; Bloom, 1974). Prior experience leads high-risk students to see achievement as a forced choice between total success vs. total failure (cf. Atkinson & Feather [Eds.], 1966; Holt, 1970). The SCOPE inquiry into student attitudes revealed that high-risk students typically have a need to expect success before they undertake a task (only a third of the conventional students felt this way). Erratic performance is natural in stressful areas, such as composition instruction. Still, I have found many non-traditional students bright, capable, and articulate, once they attain enough success to overcome their anxieties, inhibitions, and alienations (cf. Shaughnessy, 1977).

 2.23.9 Blaming failure on “low abilities” among learners is more convenient than developing more effectual educational approaches (cf. I.2.1; 1.3.2). Arguing from a simplistic model of “intelligence,¹ [Jensen’s (1973) model of intelligence has two “levels,” “I”and “II”: ability and memory for associative learning (I) vs. for conceptual learning, reasoning, and problem-solving (II). Level I is claimed necessary for level II, but not vice-versa — an assertion not supported by the evidence (Horn, 1976; cf. Grover, 1981). Jensen’s model sneakily legitimizes the independence and primacy of behavioral experimental psychology as over against cognitive psychology.] Arthur Jensen (1969, 1973) claims Black children to be genetically inferior. The inability of other researchers to equalize performance with less culturally biased tests was taken as further support of this outrageous claim (Jensen, 1980). What Jensen’s own fragmented, decontextualized “scientific” mentality prevents him from seeing is that high-pressure test-taking itself is a heavily acculturated middle-class activity (cf. Thorndike, 1968; Fishman, Deutsch, Kogan, North, & Whiteman, 1967; Roth, 1974; Marks, 1982). Tests “are unfair to culturally deprived children,” who, “in comparison with their middle-class agemates, have fewer test-taking skills, are less responsive to speed pressure, are less highly motivated in taking tests, have less rapport with the examiner, and are less familiar with the specific vocabulary and tasks that make up the content of the tests” (Ausubel, 1967: 313). Even if content items are shifted toward Black culture, the testing situation retains its fundamental imbalance. Moreover, the whole notion of “intelligence” is so poorly understood at present (I.3.2ff) that it is irresponsible to use test scores to slam the door on disadvantaged children.² [Case histories show that people’s lives and self-respect have been badly damaged by how they scored on the insensitive tests marketed by the Educational Testing Service, against whose judgements few students can effectively protest (cf. Nairn, 1980; 1.3.5f). The “verbal” parts of those tests are, in my judgment, especially arbitrary and questionable.] {22}

 2.23.10 “Compensatory education programs haven’t worked well in the past.” In early years, the value and direction of these programs was not clear (cf. Blocker, Plummer, & Richardson, 1965; Roueche, 1968). Direct evaluation was still rare (cf. Kendrick & Thomas, 1970). According to occasional probes, only a third of the non-traditional students entering special programs at community colleges completed the two years of study (Ludwig & Gold, 1969; Snyder & Blocker, 1970). But this discouraging record is misleading. Colleges and their staff were ill-prepared: “Remediation efforts […] consisted largely of watered-down versions of regular college courses. Each department in the college assumed responsibility for organizing and teaching the course, and in many instances instructors believed that the integrity of the department and the scholarly content of the discipline must be protected. Students, meanwhile, continued to fail and to resent even more the subject and the traditional manner in which the educational process was conducted. Instructors were assigned to remedial courses based on the pecking order of seniority and tenure in the department” (Roueche & Kirk, 1973: 11). The upshot was a paradox. The least experienced faculty had to teach the most difficult courses without appropriate textbooks, syllabuses, or compensation in lower teaching loads and higher pay. There was no terminology for explaining to these students what their problems were and how writing is organized. Traditional grammar is not an effective aid in such settings (cf. V.2.1, 16, 27).

 2.23.11 Under such conditions, compensatory education programs could hardly succeed. But when the programs are appropriately re-designed, clear benefits are attained, as Roueche and Kirk (1973: 82ff) have shown. Layout and materials must be genuinely innovative, simply repeating time-worn drills won’t help (Mellon, 1981: 56; cf. 1.2.22). Non-punitive grading alleviates the success-or-failure fixation mentioned in 1.2.23.8. Coursework should be self-paced to accommodate individual differences (cf. I.2.23.8). Course materials must be demonstrably relevant to the skills being acquired (I.2.23.1). Genuinely committed instructors should be assigned on a voluntary basis. Reliable counseling services should be provided by the college. And, finally, a smooth transition to regular coursework should be provided later on.

 2.23.12 “Soon, computers will take over all the writing from human beings anyway.” This myth reveals one among many popular misunderstandings of the nature of computers. The present volume, for example, was written on a “word processor,” in this case a primitive micro-computer with a text-editing software package; yet in no sense did the computer do the writing. It reduces the mechanical drudgery of writing and revising simply offers wonderful capabilities for drafting, formatting, word-searching, cross-referencing, indexing, and printing (cf. V1. 50). But it has no idea what to write about. {23} Full automatic text production programs so far write in a stilted, limited style below the versatility of high school writers, and function only as prototypes for research (e.g. Klein et al., 1973; Goldman, 1975; Wong, 1975; Meehan, 1976; Cohen, 1978; Davey, 1978; Mann & Moore, 1980). (However, unscrupulous internet firms do market ready-made essays students can buy — for at least $50 — and hand in as ‘their own’, hoping to hell the teacher hasn’t read it before.) Besides, even if text production could be computerized, humans would make a grave mistake in abandoning writing as a mode of consolidating and developing knowledge (I.2.23.5) and of finding an individual voice (I.2.8.6).

 2.24 These, then, are some obstinate myths about composition and its chances in the schools. The literacy crisis, whatever its origins and status may be, at least assures us that specious, convenient rationalizations of writing failure can no longer be accepted at face value. The proper recourse is rather to design realistic, workable models of the writing process, and from there, the coursework to guide that process for all learners, irrespective of their social and personal backgrounds.  

3. EVALUATION AND GRADING 

 3.1 Widespread anxieties about literacy are closely related to the heavy pressure in American education to quantify performance, as if learning would instantly cease without constant checking and measuring (cf. I.3.27). Throughout schooling, children endure batteries of diagnostics and tests that put a numerical value on everything conceivable. Test results are popularly misunderstood to be not a diagnostic for guiding a child’s evolution and expansion, but as a statement of the limits to which the child can aspire (I.3.4). The tests become self-fulfilling prophecies for an entire school career, and-when scores and grades are used in hiring beyond in professional life. Graduation from high school or college now depends on “competency tests,” especially in English (cf. Cooper, 1981b; Mellon, 1981; Myers, 1981; Odell, 1981). Frequently, such tests are devised by “educational theorists and researchers and curriculum specialists” who “slight or ignore the basic questions about competency testing in language, reading, writing, and media” (Cooper, 1981a: xiii). Hence, the tests reflect little awareness of current theories of cognition and communication (I.2.15; VI.3.2).

 3.2 Standardized testing has gone far beyond specific classroom tasks to become a widely respected measure of general intelligence and aptitude. A century ago, Francis Galton (1883) (a cousin of Charles Darwin) asserted that intelligence is an inherited, i.e., genetically determined, ability. This view was accepted by Alfred Binet, who devised an IQ test still in use today in its “Stanford revision,” and by a long succession of later psychologists (e.g. Spearman, 1904; Burt, 1940; Jensen, 1972). Marks (1982) maintains that the view survived because it was congenial to such ideologies as {23} Darwinian evolution and competitive commerce; but the view is still empirically unwarranted and theoretically confused. Even today, researchers have no secure consensus about the nature and constitution of intelligence (cf. the controversy in Sternberg & Detterman [Eds.], 1979). Some see it as a single general capacity, others as a set of more or less independent factors, and still others as the interaction of a general capacity with the sub-factors it supervises (survey in Das, Kirby, & Jarman, 1979; Sternberg, 1979). The “aptitudes” measured by the tests might well be chance products not based on any inherent personal merit or capacity, but rather on the conditions of the testing situation as such. The Federal Trade Commission found in a 1979 study that coaching schools for test-taking significantly improve one’s scores. But surely these schools don’t suddenly raise one’s intelligence!

 3.3 The psychological and social impact of the testing situation itself is precarious. Many tests deliberately pose tasks not found either in school or everyday life, as if abilities could exist in a vacuum, devoid of purpose and context (Cicourel, 1974). The tenet of experimental psychologists that “objective validity” is guaranteed when subjects don’t know the point of a test makes sense only if we assume that abilities are wired into the brain, waiting to be detected when people are caught off guard. Success in real life seldom depends on performing novel and meaningless tasks. Standardized testing eradicates the crucial distinction between what is known and what can be accessed and performed on a single occasion (cf. Kintsch, 1977: 442; 1.2.8.2). High-pressure performance under extreme time restrictions overloads processing and degrades performance (ef.III.1.17; III.3.3ff; VI.15). On such testing, people may underperform at least as much as they could overperform if they had the chance to practice ahead of time. Hence, the tests “measure what people cannot do, rather than what they can do” (Shuy, 1981a: 169). Whether or not overload occurs is related less to one’s intelligence than to one’s threshold of anxiety. Many famous thinkers do not work well under high pressure, yet average children have to do so if they want to reap the benefits allotted on the basis of test scores.

 3.4 Test-taking is a “social activity” (Roth, 1974) for which children are unequally prepared, regardless of their mental potential (1.2.23.9). Even if the scores did yield an accurate measure, they only gauge the status quo, not the child’s capacity for development (Fishman et al., 1967: 163). Yet neither the uncertainty about intelligence nor the irrelevance of the tests has prevented the misuse of scores to judge children and to stereotype their abilities at a fixed level. The child’s personal development is programmed to run a certain way, and, because the mind is influenced by the model it builds of itself, the child tends to conform to the level “predicted” by the tests. Standardized testing teaches the child to accept a mental profile obtained under unfavorable, uncontrollable conditions as a statement of immutable endowments, like the features of the face. If “unintelligent” children do something clever or remarkable, it must be an accident; “intelligent” children {24} doing exactly the same thing are revealing their “genetic” capacity. The reverse interpretation is placed on mistakes and failures.

 3.5 The psychological and social repercussions of testing intelligence and aptitude came quite unexpectedly. Standardized testing was originally conceived to be profoundly democratic, allowing capable students of all social classes to demonstrate their potential on equal grounds. But instead, a new caste system arose, based on test-taking skills; and not surprisingly, the system tallied excellently with the old one based on social status and wealth (Burt, 1943; Nairn, 1980). A College Board Report on the SAT scores of 647,031 students tested in 1973-74 revealed that scores corresponded perfectly to parental income. Aptitude and intelligence seem to be about as hereditary and predictable as money. Moreover, surveys show that aptitude tests, such as those administered by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), are poor predictors of achievement. A careful investigation of some 827 validity studies conducted by the ETS between 1964 and 1974 showed that “ETS aptitude tests on the average predict grades only 8 to 15% better than random prediction with a pair of dice” (Nairn, 1980: 59f).¹ [Specifically, the SAT is, on the average, II.9% accurate in predicting first-year college grades. According to the 1977 report for the Carnegie Council of Policy Studies in Higher Education, the accuracy of the LSAT is 13%, that of the ORE 11%, and that of the GMAT a mere 8% (Nairn, 1980: 60ff). ] Grades in turn have been found to be poor predictors of scientific or technical creativity in a later career (Taylor, Smith, & Ghiselin, 1975).

 3.6 Suppose now that intelligence is qualitative, not quantitative, i.e., to be described with attributes, not measured in numbers. Its key factor is the ability to treat any task by specifying high-powered procedures. As the child’s intellect evolves, these procedures emerge from a steady increase in the elaboration, differentiation, and complexity of cognitive organization (cf. Piaget, 1976, 1977). Intelligence therefore depends on whether the continual re-organizing of cognition happens to create the procedures for a strategically designed processing system — a development which educational institutions can hardly support if they understand it only vaguely. Usually, the child is left alone to make sense out of massive course content in math, social studies, history, etc., with whatever cognitive resources and strategies happen to develop on their own. It is assumed that force-feeding a child with facts and figures ensures an optimal mind. At every step, tests are administered, not to see if the child is thinking, but to see if the facts and figures were absorbed. Tests of “IQ” and “aptitude” complete the picture by gauging a few effects of a cognitive evolution barely addressed in its own right by school instruction. Obviously, this “intelligence” is more a by-product than a determiner of the child’s struggle to work in an environment of scrutiny and high pressure.

 3.7 In some areas, competition and comparison can be irrelevant, even {26} misleading. The abilities of two children might be simply different realizations of general human potential. The dimensions that make them comparable on a standard scale could be totally unrelated to their most important capacities. For example, creative achievement transcends the conditions in which it occurs, and succeeds precisely by setting its own standards (cf. I.2.23.7; Ghiselin, 1975). The insistence on standardized measures therefore necessarily bypasses creativity, and may even discourage it (cf. Getzels & Jackson, 1962).

 3.8 In real life, a significant accomplishment normally emerges from a painstaking series of approximations that are technically wrong or unsatisfactory, but point the way to something better (Papert, 1980). An initial discontent with the current state of affairs triggers a search for an objective whose nature, at the outset, may be wholly unknown. Progress is riddled with miscalculations, backtrackings, revisions, and rejections until the objective gradually comes into view. Similarly, entry into a new, unfamiliar domain of more complex skills is necessarily marked by an increase in errors over the previous stage of limited, but well-rehearsed skills (I.2.17; I.3.2, 24; III.1.23, 28; V2.15ff, 28;