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Summary Of Cognition, Convention, And Certainty By Patricia Bizzell

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Patricia Bizzell is right that college writing instructors must teach students how to think in academia because doing so enhances critical thinking and analytical skills, prepares students for upcoming challenges, and allows them to think independently. The purpose of a college is to develop a student through exposure to diverse perspectives, cultures, and experiences. Patricia Bizzell’s thesis in her essay, “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing,” revolves around the idea that college writing instruction should not primarily focus on teaching students the conventions of academic discourse but also on developing their cognitive abilities stating, “We now see the ‘writing problem’ as a thinking problem primarily because we used to take our students’ thinking for …show more content…

The function of college writing instructors should be to educate students on how to overcome college struggles, analyze information alongside critical thinking, and encourage their students to have an independent and creative mind. To begin, college institutions serve as higher forms of education that develop students and give them more opportunities to sculpt themselves into the people they want to be by providing opportunities for specialization in fields such as engineering, medicine, and business. Moreover, colleges can further develop your critical thinking skills while creating more skills that benefit you as you continue your journey in school and your expedition into the world after graduating. They also allow the development of friendships and connections that can last a lifetime, allowing for potential helplines in the future. For instance, the collaboration between a civil engineering and architecture student can deepen their understanding of structural design and potentially lead to future collaborations. A possible instance is the construction and design of a home they wish to

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In her text, “Cognition, Convention and Certainty,” Patricia Bizzell describes the writing process through both inner-directed and outer-directed theories in order to illustrate that the writing process is infirmed by both student’s natural thought processes and their discourse community She uses her text to explain both theories, and to argue for the implementation of a new pedagogy focused on discourse analysis. First, Bizzell introduces the inner –directed theory, which seeks to discover the writing processes through the universal and fundamental structure of language. Conversely, she explains that the outer-directed theory instead argues that the individual’s discourse community does not teach a generalized form of language but rather the

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