Implied Reader, Reflected Text

Teacher Control in the Writing Classroom

Classroom writing communities can be arranged along a continuum of degree of teacher control of decision-making around classroom writing projects and around strategies learners interiorize through reflective practice and experience. Pedagogy premised on high teacher control, especially in composition pedagogy, risks mechanizing and routinizing writing in meaningless drudgery or production of superficial piffle. Too many learners who might otherwise blossom resist because they are bored with writing the same paragraph about their best friend or their career goals, many struggle without resolution to problems like having nothing to say and not knowing how to say it, many reject serious engagement outright because they are not seriously being engaged.

Viewed as a problem-solving process, learning to do writing entails firsthand experiences in a) identifying the kinds of problems writers face and a range of tools available to solve them as well as b) reflecting on the outcomes of decisions consciously made with peers and teachers. Such a view underscores a need for a pedagogy of structured protocols and accountability mechanisms (publication deadlines) with visible and public criteria for good writing negotiated by the community. Such a generalization applies in the academic and the real world. This view of writing sees portfolio pedagogy as a central mechanism for sharing decision-making control with learners. Research completed in the 1980s and 1990s on portfolio assessment is highly relevant. The affordances of digital sharing and communication coupled with a new appreciation for the good and the bad of online schooling cry out for young researchers to capture the secondhand smoke from this era. Wear your masks.

As the de facto primary audience member, occasion setter, purpose shaper, and subject decider for an assigned piece of writing, teachers have the authority to make every important writing decision for students in advance. For example, a teacher interested in showing students the value and importance of description and sensory details might assign a task requiring students to do just that: Write a short essay describing a lemon—900 words maximum. Teacher might bring some lemons to class, perhaps, some zest to evoke clouds of words arranged in a visual of yellow word bubbles linked to the core of the diagram—a lemon tree. The rationale could be to reduce the difficulty of the writing problem by making words and ideas accessible.

Does the writer have no good ideas about lemons? No words? Why a lemon? Why not pick a fruit? What should a writer do under such circumstances? Where does one go to experience instruction in solving such problems?

Teacher might then propose an audience (lower case): Imagine that you are writing a letter to a pen pal in another class who has never tasted or seen a lemon. Or write a letter to a friend. Or write a letter to your grandmother. Kids write a lot of letters and thank you notes. Not a bad idea, but not a big idea, either. Close, charitable audiences whom, you assume, know little and care less about lemons keep things simple—audiences who will never read the passage.

All you need are words to fill slots in syntax. They don’t have to mean anything.

At this point teacher could teach the writers (decide) to organize their shared word clouds. (Organize) One group of words talks about (caption) sensory details (be sure to appeal to all five senses—listen… can you hear your lemon?). (Organize) One group talks about the (caption) wonderful concoctions that are made with lemons.

And so on. Problems are pre-identified, solutions are given, themes or captions are decided. Where is the writer?

Reader Control in the Real World

In the age of blogging and other forms of digital publishing, the relationship between a writer and an audience has become more permeable, more semi-conversational, but nothing has changed fundamentally that I can discern. I am likely revealing an ignorance here. Writers still instruct their readers in how to read their texts. Ideologically idiotic audiences are more common, probably because of the affordances of technology. But writers in the real world are controlled in varying degrees by their implied reader reflected in their texts. Writers in schools are controlled by teachers.

Captive audiences pre-Internet and today alike do the reading and writing they are assigned. And elective audiences are still in control of what and how they read and write despite the ease of clicking on a new link. Convenience and access are fundamental changes for readers, perhaps making the writer’s task more difficult, perhaps opening the door to ideological idiocy, but not much different.

During a five year pre-Internet period of part time employment as an adjunct instructor of Freshman Composition at the community college level, I did a side gig as a writer of articles for popular periodicals. This was during the reign of Writer’s Market, a thick volume cataloguing every venue for publication from Ford Times to Runners World, when freelancers wrote query letters to editors.

I published often in Shape, a magazine for the health conscious—never under my byline. Usually, the author was an MD. I picked out magazines I wanted to target on the shelves in book stores and supermarkets and studied them from top to bottom trying to locate the implied reader, who would pay $1.50 for the mag. I would need to reflect their expectations and tastes in my texts if I were to get a contract.

In an earlier post I discuss my experiences teaching First Year composition in a maximum security psychiatric prison. For two pre-Internet years I read student essays that addressed one of two audiences: Readers who might look at the inmate’s patently false imprisonment sympathetically or readers who have a moral obligation to do something about the failures of the correctional system or the corruption of the courts.

No matter what rhetorical structure I was teaching, report of information to causal analysis to expository argument, I got a continuous flow of the same ideas. For a change, I never had the sense that the inmates were writing for me, the instructor. The prison population was bifurcated with the vast majority seriously undereducated and the infinitesimal few seriously smart. I got the latter in the composition classes. Their purposes for writing overrode my authority to control their decisions as writers.

The Role of Reflective Abstraction in Constructing a Sense of Audience

It’s true that writers consider a range of aspects in thinking through what sort of text is likely to achieve the writer’s purpose with a given reader. A major consideration is knowledge base. What knowledge can be assumed to be distributed within the readership? What knowledge must be elaborated in the text?

Piaget’s notion of “reflective abstraction” has been useful to me in thinking through the cognitive work writers do in order to align the knowledge demands and expectations they design in the text array with the reality of the readership’s likely understanding.

Ginsburg and Opper (1988¹) use the concept “animal”to unpack the Piagetian discovery of umbrella schemas, helpful to writers. Until they reach two years old, children begin to collect sense data and organize them such that they know the rattle makes noise, the teddy bear is soft and cuddly, the fireplace is hot. But they need more experience to construct functional schemas at higher levels in the hierarchy of cognitive schemas, coded criteria to integrate and extend information flow and assemble pop up structures for temporary use. Around two years old the world gets more complicated, not because the world changes, but because functional cognitive processes expand as intensional structures accumulate squirrel by squirrel, block by block.

For a simple example, the ten month old child who crawls too close to the hearth and burns a finger and gets a bath one day in water a touch too hot. At fifteen months the child touches a metal railing in the sun and jerks away. At the sensory level, the child constructs a cognitive category for “hot” and is able to predict consequences for touching certain things.

Piaget described the contents of such schemas as “intensional.” We rely on sensory details stored in memory to make a match between a noumenon (a thing in itself outside the body) and a phenomenon (knowing a thing inside the body). A squirrel in the park is known when the child matches it with information previously acquired and stored in a file, if you will. Eventually, the child will construct intensional schemas for cats, dogs, birds, and so on.

As time passes, the child will construct “extensional”schemas, functional knowledge that serve as umbrellas. “Animal,” for example, covers territory including squirrels, cats, dogs, birds, even stretching to cover people in Biology. Unlike an intensional schema matching noumena, these umbrella schemas are abstract. There are no “animals” in the real world—the meaning of animal is internal, distributed, useful to the thinker, made from links between this higher-level “animal” and the hundreds of creatures that swim, fly, gallop, and walk the world.

Piaget used the terms “intensional” and “extensional” to distinguish between fine-grained subsystem schemas with traces of sensory images of reality and more abstract definitional-like criteria or attributes that shuttle a thought from porpoise to climate change. Ford, for example, as a subsystem schema contains a set of intensions like Made in America, truck, mustang—features that point clearly to objects in reality that match. A functional schema like auto maker permits integration of information from Chevrolet to Ford and invokes a link with Made in America, which complicates Toyota and, reaching into a subsystem schema, a Corolla.

Note that one intension in the Ford schema is another subsystem schema: Truck. If the object sitting in the driveway is a Ford truck, to register it, the observer would have to activate both the truck schema (the extension has a bed and tailgate) and the Ford schema (the extension has the word Ford stamped on the tailgate). Integrating and differentiating schemas in real time activate (re)cognition.

Abstract or whole-system schemas have no necessary extensions. Crossing over from substantive to functional schemas requires executive control over the match between intensions and extensions. Automobile, for example, may or may not point to an actual object. You may divide up your abstract navigation system into two umbrella schemas—trucks and automobiles—listed under the functional schema ‘vehicle.’ Nothing in the extensional world—civil war is an abstract structure or model with a chassis and a lot of options. Toyota has extensions or tentacles, Corolla even finer, more restrictive, this Corolla license plate # even more.

Want to buy my Corolla? What questions do you have? What do you want to inspect? Do you want an expert’s opinion?

Ignoring Audience, Privileging Language, Devaluing Meaning

Nobody really needs to understand Piaget to grasp the intricate, delicate mental structures we’ve built alone and together and shared communally in Long Term Memory. A great benefit of reading, I believe, is the set of affordances it offers for sophisticated applications of functional schemas you’ve made whether you know it or not. If you know a lot about something, if you are an expert, if you’ve carefully organized your knowledge as a habit of mind over decades, you are on the cusp of some really cool reading experiences during your golden years. Long-term working memory has gotten its full growth.

Ericsson and Kintsch (1995²) published a classic piece titled Text Comprehension, Memory, and Learning which discusses a memory feature called “long-term working memory” to explain how we are capable of organizing very complex, detailed information not only for the long term, but also for retrieval at the point of need all the way from deep storage in a few milliseconds and then—whoosh—pack it up and put it away as the focus of need and interest changes in real time. Short-term working memory is very, very short. The proposed long-term working memory module is capable of drawing vast systems of detailed meaning (think: China) into focus for the next ten seconds, minute, hour, morning and then return it, perhaps changed, to storage.

Learning to write for a reader entails learning to assess the state of one’s own knowledge and understanding of a topic, using long-term working memory as a resource; exploring the needs and interests of those who might read a text on that topic by drawing on current knowledge and memories of prior experiences with reading and writing on this topic for this occasion and readership; being clear about why it is important to address this topic for this reader at this time, why a reader might do the work of reading, and what one’s purpose is. The composed text is a reflection of the implied reader as the author conceived the reader at the time of production.

If writing is done habitually ignoring the audience, if getting words into sentences in unified paragraphs drives the work, if meaning takes a back seat to form, humanity may be better off turning over writing tasks to chatGPT where meaning is at least the goal of cognition, artificial or organic. As in reading, writing is a whole body, whole brain, whole language, whole culture experience. Teaching it takes at least a functional version my my friend the chameleon, the writing portfolio.

1. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/77496/Copyright?

2. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066X.49.4.294