All I Really Need To Know I Learned From The Beatles

“Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.” Who says it better than The Beatles? I think the eight-year-old mentioned in Britton’s “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” captures the same idea, just not quite as poetically as John Lennon did in his "Across the Universe" lyrics. He said, “(Writing) just comes into your head, it’s not like thinking, it’s just there.” I relate to this when reflecting on my own writing process. Sometimes it feels like there is some magical force compelling me to write more, my words flowing out from my fingertips as I rapidly type away on my little MacBook.

But, Flower and Hayes I think would call my “magical force” their “myth of discovery.” They believe there is no mysterious idea lurking in your mind just waiting to be brought out through writing. Instead, they believe that discovery and its insights are “only the end result of a complicated intellectual process.” As I read more, it seemed clear how their research showed that writers do make meanings instead of finding them. I think their definition of the Rhetorical Problem and the six parts they outline make sense. However, I did feel like something was missing in their findings. Is it the emotion that Alice Brand discusses in “The Why of Cognition?” I’m not convinced because I didn’t understand how Flower and Hayes’s model ignores emotion. Their test subjects did seem to follow their emotions when deciding how they wanted to be perceived by their reader or how they wanted to affect their audience. One study member said, “I feel enormously doubtful of my capacity to relate very effectively to the audience,” and she went on about how she would try to present herself in “a simple and straightforward and unpretentious way, I hope.” I don’t think that this statement implies “emotional neutrality.” I think these writers did seem to be exercising “inclusion and exclusion” based on their feelings.

I know that when I write my emotions play a role in deciding how to move forward or how to tweak what I’ve written. I feel like my process is much like the “Retrospective Structuring” of Perl and Egendorf: “shuttling back and forth from (my) sense of what (I) wanted to say to the words on the page and back to address what is available to (me) inwardly.” I think if I recorded my every thought during my process (as did the Flower and Hayes study participants) that I would see how I do have goals outside of just the assignment and audience. However, I know that sometimes those things come naturally, or I don’t consciously ponder over them. I think that this is why teaching this process is so challenging. I appreciate that Flower and Hayes say, “We can help (students) create inspiration” rather than just waiting for it by teaching them to “explore and define their own problems.” But, as I think it goes in most theories about teaching, this seems easier said than done.