Bloggng Bizzel*

Bizzel's Cognition, Convention, Certainty has to do with how writing relates to thinking. In this sense, the focus of the article is an exploration into how thinking is related to writing- not so much as to why or what writing is(as we have been previously studying).

According to Bizzel, composition and cognition are binded by three seperate but related capacities. Cognition says that we all have the capability to learn language-that it is innate, convention says this our social usage of this langauge leads to group conventions, and lastly certainity is reached because this social and cognitive langauge brings all discourse together.
For me, the most interesting part of the article came about when she discussed the two ways of thinking in terms of how this social discourse is related to writing and composition.
The inner-directed theory suggeststhe earliest stage, cognition, is the only developmental aspect in composition that is innate; and because of this, all students must have developed this process before they can move on to more complex things-such as addressing the audience.
The outer-directed way of thinking says that all language learning is sharpened in a social context; that all learning is collaborative. They say the most important thing a compsotion teacher can teach his students is that writing is discourse, and that both exist in social communities for the worthy.

Bizzel does not specifically say what theory, inner or outer is better suited for compositional education and theory. Rather, she seems to suggest that elements of both idea camps can be extracted to benefit one another- and the process as a whole. Conversely, she does go as far to criticize the inner-directed mode for being "insensitive to poor writers" because as Flower and Haye's suggest, writing problems exist because of student's cognitive deficiances. Bizzel believes that because the cognition aspect is innate, writing problems can be pinned to the learned aspect of discourse itself.

I found this article somewhat comfusing because of its complex nature. I did however, understand the core concepts which she discussed, and more applicably, related to the nature of writing. Cognition, Convention, and Certainity is an interesting way to approach writing because of its broad and inner-connected way of explaining how cognitive processes lead to composition. But how does this process happen? Bizzel would say that it is an innate process started in the cognition phase, and leads to her social communities. But why? Bizzel has already addressed how, but why or what motivates this innate developement? What brings us to the discouse convention, what goals motivate us to shape our compositional motors.