McCormick Chapter 4

"Reading to Write: the cultural imperatives underlying cognitive acts"

In chapter 4, McCormick discusses a study that explores student's perceptions and processes about writing, using the topic of time management. McCormick writes from a perspective concerned with metacognition and how awareness (or obliviousness) of cultural and ideological influences affects student writing. She identifies three major concerns students have that limit their compositions:

• Closure
• Objectivity
• Contradiction

She notes that students often confuse the end "product" of an essay with the writing process, where the student assumed goals of essay final drafts must be cohesive and have a sense of "closure," written from an "objective" perspective, and free from contradictions. 

McCormick discusses the problems with these common assumptions of students, suggesting ways to reframe student understanding:

Closure

• The false goal of "closure" creates in students the need to rid their writing of contradiction in favor of cohesiveness. 
• This model limits students' learning through the composition process (writing to think). Moreover, it is not representative of the true model of academic discourse.
• Students must be taught to write in drafts and stages, so that their writing is exploratory, not limited by a premature focus on closure.

Objectivity

• We live in a society that values the individual--so the individual voice must be allowed to enter the essay. 
• Not allowing first person in essays "decenters" students
• Writing that attempts to use an "objective" voice, is really adopting ideas from other authors and sources that have inherent ideologies. 
• Students must learn to write with their own sense of authority, we must teach students to speak for themselves and analyze the ideologies of institutions. 
• Metacognition of the historical and ideological influences on education is important for developing student writers.

Contradiction

• McCormick proposes using the theme of "tentativeness" in the composition process as a means for exploring ideas, allowing for critical thinking at every stage of writing.
• She discusses the ideological forces that encourage summarizing in some subjects and situations, allowing students to take the safe route of repeating information, rather than rethinking the information in relation to their individual understandings. 
• She proposes that contradictions in writing are a good sign, because they show thought and allow students to grapple with ideological arguments. 

Combining cognitivism and cultural models of reading and writing allows us to understand that students must develop metacognitive awareness of cultural ideologies that impact their assumptions about and participation in the writing processes.