What We Need to Know About Writing

Bizzell

In Bizzell's article"What We Need to Know about Writing" that the writing problem is a thinking problem. She goes on to say that we think students come up with their own ideas and just need a little help putting those ideas into words. Those students that came up with better ideas were simply smarter students. The students that did not have great ideas were just not as bright as the other students and therefore needed to be exposed to good models of writing. This reminds me of Perl's article with the experienced and unexperienced writers. Perl stated that unexperienced writers were not looking at the whole picture when writing and revising a paper. Unexperienced writers need to overcome grammar and focus on the purpose of the paper. When it comes to inner directed and outer-directed theories I would have to say that I think I understand the outter-directed theory better. It makes sense that discourse communities would impact your writing. Even though you belong to a certain community that does not limit you to one area of that community. You can have a family conversation and a work conversation and even though the topics will vary it does not mean that the discourse came from two different places.