Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reduction” (345).

Rose, Mike. “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reduction” (345).
Whoa! Lots of psychobabble! A lesson in Piaget and other cognitivists.
“Cognitive style, broadly defined, is an “individual’s characteristic and consistent manner of processing and organizing what he [or she] sees and thinks about’ (Harre and Lamb 98)” (347).
“it is not a measure of how much people know or how well they mentally perform a task, but the manner in which they perform, their way of going about solving a problem, their style” (347).
Witkin articulated (or anylitic) vs. global perception:
“At one extreme there is a consistent tendency for experience to be global and diffuse;
The organization of the field as a whole dictates the manner in which its parts are experienced. At the other extreme there is a tendency for experience to be delineated and structured; parts of a field are experienced as discrete and the field as a whole organized” (348).
“field-dependent people are more socially oriented, more responsive to a myriad of information, etc. while field-independent people tend to be individualistic, interested in abstract subject matter and so on” (352).
“We in the West are drawn to the idea of consistency in personality (from Renaissance humors to Jungian types0, and that attraction, I think, compels us to seek out similar, interrelated consistencies in cognition” (552).
“All current theories of cognition that I’m familiar with posit that human beings bring coherence to behavior by abstracting general principles from experiences, by interpreting and structuring what they see and do” (353).
“But attempts to comprehend or generate writing—what is perceived or produced as logical or metaphoric or coherent or textured—involve a stunning range of competencies: from letter recognition to syntactic fluency to an understanding of discourse structure and genre (see, e.g. Gardner and Winner 376-80). And such a range, according toeverything we know, involves the whole brain in ways that defy the broad claims of the hemisphericity theorists (360).
“suffice it to say that a large number of studies has demonstrated that brief training sessions can have dramatic results on performance” (364).
“Much problem-solving and, I suspect, the reasoning involved in the production of most kinds of writing rely not only on abstract logical operations, but, as well, on the rich interplay of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic associations, feelings, metaphor, social perception, the matching of mental representations of past experience with new experience, and so on. And writing as the whole span of rhetorical theory makes clear, is deeply embedded in the particulars of the human situation” (367).
“The operative verb here is “transformed.” Writing transforms human cognition” (367).
“But it appears to be historically, culturally, and economically reductive—and politically naïve—to view literacy as embodying an automatic transformational power” (371).
“theories end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences in cognition. At best, people are placed along slots on a single continuum; at worst they are split into mutually exclusive camps—with one camp clearly having cognitive and social privilege over the other” (276).
“the theories inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes that should themselves, be the subject of our investigation. At least since Plato, we in the West have separated heart from head, and in one powerful manifestation of that split we contrast rational thought with emotional sensibility, intellectual acuity with social awareness—and we often link the analytical vs. holistic opposition to the polarities” (377).
I wish I had someone to discuss this with!!!!!!