thought that Prospero was a loving father, in contrast to several of her classmates who thought that Prospero was a tyrannical ruler and parent. The instructor helped her recast the introduction to set up a thesis.
Many persons believe that Prospero is an evil person in the play. They claim that Prospero exhibits a harsh, destructive control over Miranda and also, like Faust, seeks superhuman knowledge through his magic. However, I contend that Prospero is a kind and loving father.
The student is now prepared to make an argument. The paper poses a problem (What kind of father is Prospero?), indicates an opposing view (Prospero is harsh and hateful), and asserts a contestable thesis (Prospero is loving). She now needs to develop her reasons for claiming that Prospero is loving and organize her paper hierarchically to support these reasons with appropriate textual details.
It must be noted, however, that it is not just inexperienced writers who produce chronological structures. In their pioneering study of writing and cognition, Linda Flower and John R. Hayes (1977) show that long passages of chronological writing characterize the early drafts of expert writers (see also Flower, 1979). In fact, they argue that chronological thinking provides a natural way of retrieving ideas and details from long‐term memory. But experienced writers convert “and then” material into hierarchically focused material as they revise, whereas novice writers seem satisfied with the draft at the “and then” stage.
“All About” Writing, or Encyclopedic Order
Whereas the “and then” paper strings details on a chronological frame, the “all about” paper tries to say a little bit of everything about a topic. When well written, such papers may seem organized hierarchically because the writer usually groups data by category or topics. But the categories do not function as reasons in support of a thesis. Rather, like the headings in an encyclopedia article, they are simply ways of arranging information that do not add up to an argument.
Unfortunately, educators in America have a long tradition of rewarding “all about” writing. Teachers encourage such writing whenever they assign topics rather than problems. Typical topic‐centered examples include assigning a “report on North Dakota” in fifth‐grade social studies, a “library paper on General Rommel” in eleventh‐grade history, or “a term paper on schizophrenia” in college psychology. Assignments like these have endured because they have one major virtue: they increase students' general store of knowledge about North Dakota, General Rommel, or schizophrenia. But they often do little to increase students' maturity as writers and thinkers.
Consider the difference between a student who is asked to write a traditional term paper on, say, Charles Darwin versus a student who is asked to write a research paper on Darwin that must begin with the presentation of a problem or question that the writer will investigate and try to resolve.
Without guidance, the first student will tend toward “all about” writing, perhaps producing an initial outline with headings like these:
1 Early childhood
2 How Darwin became interested in evolution
3 The voyage of the Beagle
4 An explanation of Darwin's theory
5 Darwin's influence
This paper promises to be encyclopedic and devoid of surprise. But when the student is guided toward a focus on a significant question that grows out of the writer's interests and that demands critical thinking, undergraduate research writing can spring to life. Flower (1993, 299) describes a successful undergraduate research project on Darwin written at Carnegie Mellon University for a course in cognitive psychology. Flower's student Kate, a sophomore, posed the following problem about Darwin at the end of her introduction:
In this paper I will look at the creativity of Charles Darwin by asking two questions. Does Darwin's work support or contradict current psychological definitions of creativity? And secondly, what is the best way to account for Darwin's own kind of creativity? Which of the major theories best fits the facts of Darwin's life and work?
Within her paper, Kate presented different theories of creativity and examined Darwin's work in the light of each theory. She proposed that Darwin was indeed creative and that his creativity could best be accounted for by the “problem‐solving theory” of creativity, as opposed to the “romantic imagination theory,” the “Freudian sexual energy theory,” or “Wallis's four‐stage theory.”
Kate's essay reveals how successful undergraduate writing can be when students are actively engaged in posing and exploring questions. Emphasizing inquiry and question asking is thus a promising antidote to “all about” writing.
Data Dump Writing, or Random Organization
Both “and then” writing and “all about” writing have discernible organizational plans—chronological in the former case and encyclopedic in the latter. Data dump writing, by contrast, often has no discernible structure. It reveals a student overwhelmed with information and uncertain what to do with it. Commonly encountered in research papers, data dump writing patches together quotes, statistics, and other raw information without an apparent purpose or a coherent organizational plan. It takes all the data the writer gathered about topic X and dumps it, as it were, on the reader's desk. Data dump writing is particularly facilitated by the internet because it is so easy to cut and paste material from websites; students often lift material word for word without assimilating it into their own language. Data dump papers can create nightmares for teachers with their exasperating mix of incomprehensible structure and possible plagiarism. Because data dump writing is familiar to all teachers, it needs no specific illustration here.
What Causes These Organizational Problems?
The “and then” paper, the “all about” paper, and the data dump paper all reveal a retreat, in some manner, from the reasoned analysis and argumentation that we value in academic writing. Why do these problems occur? A number of explanations have been posed. For example, writing theorists influenced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget have hypothesized that the immature organizational patterns just described are symptomatic of concrete operational reasoners, who tend to focus on data, objects, or things as opposed to propositions or forms (Bradford, 1983; Lunsford, 1979). In writing, concrete operational reasoners can string details together chronologically (“and then” writing) or arrange them in simple informational categories (“all about” writing). But creating the kinds of nested hierarchical structures required in propositional writing requires the abstract thinking that characterizes formal operations.
Other explanations focus on theories of intellectual development cited previously in this chapter, such as Perry's (1970) and Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule's (1986) schemas of cognitive growth. In both schemas, students come to college imagining knowledge as the acquisition of correct information rather than the ability, say, to argue a position or connect to a conversation. Eventually, students develop a complex view of knowledge, where individuals have to take stands in the light of their own values and the best available reasons and evidence and understand and empathize with multiple perspectives on complex issues. Composition scholars using these theories have hypothesized that students will produce cognitively immature prose as long as their attitude toward knowledge remains in the early stages of intellectual growth (Hays, 1983; Lunsford, 1985). The best teaching strategies for accelerating students' growth are tasks that ask students to consider multiple points of view; to confront clashing values; and to imagine, analyze, and evaluate alternative solutions to problems. Many of the assignments used as illustrations throughout this book have these aims.
Still other explanations focus
