Writing as a Mode of Learning

Abstract

WRITING represents a unique mode of learning-not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique. That will be my contention in this paper. The thesis is straightforward. Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-andproduct possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies. Although the notion is clearly debatable, it is scarcely a private belief. Some of the most distinguished contemporary psychologists have at least implied such a role for writing as heuristic. Lev Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, and Jerome Bruner, for example, have all pointed out that higher cognitive functions, such as analysis and synthesis, seem to develop most fully only with the support system of verbal language-particularly, it seems, of written language.' Some of their arguments and evidence will be incorporated here. Here I have a prior purpose: to describe as tellingly as possible how writing uniquely corresponds to certain powerful learning strategies. Making such a case for the uniqueness of writing should logically and theoretically involve establishing many contrasts, distinctions between (1) writing and all other verbal languaging processes-listening, reading, and especially talking; (2) writing and all other forms of composing, such as