Bizzell

Bizzel begins by examining the "old way" of teaching: "assuming students came to [teachers] with ideas and [teachers] helped them to put those ideas into words." Style, and formal properties of the "model essays" were taught. Bizzell disagrees with this and describes inner and outer-directed theorist models.

Inner-direct theorists see the discovery writing process as universal. I thought the four step model made sense to me, but was definetly not universal. The guidelines seemed too general to me and, for instance, everyone's innate capacities are not the same; everyone has different strengths, weakenesses, and some things come without thinking to people. This theory says that the structures of language and thought may be taught, and part of this is examining an audience analysis. I particularly liked the synthesis to Flower and Hayes. Bizzell takes a closer look at F&H's cognitive writing process. F&H view composing as a problem-solving activity. Although each writing task will have different contraints, the mental activity remains the same. A suggestion is given for how to help poor writers in this theory by explaining that writing takes place withing a certain community and explain the conventions within that community. I thought this was particularly helpful and relevant to tutoring. For example, if our tutor is writing in an academic community we can discuss with them that they need to relate their text to the object under study, the literature of the field and the audience while keeping the author's self-voice in mind.

The outer-directed model says that univeral principles may not be taught and that thoughts develop as the native tongue is learned. Outer-directed finds patterns of language use and reasoning that is common to all members of society. Bizzell references Collins and Gentner as they define " ' good writing' as writing that conforms to a set of rules set by some authority" (404). This immediately reminded me of the essay including bastard discourse. So is Collins and Gentner's definition the sad truth about academic writing (especially in school)? Is it not giving "good" writers enough credit?