1.5 Cognitive Scaffolding

Use your world to make writing easier.

A writer’s back-and-forth conversation with what they write, required by fragmentary inspiration, illustrates what cyberneticists call a feedback loop (Ashby, 1956; Grey Walter, 1963; McCulloch, 1965; Wiener, 1948). Cyberneticists argued feedback loops provide a critical means for behavioral control. Cyberneticists defined a feedback loop as the constant back-and-forth between an agent’s actions upon the world and how such changes guide the agent’s future actions. Feedback tells an agent their distance from a goal. Feedback causes an agent to perform an action which brings the agent closer to their goal.

The feedback loop created by fragmentary inspiration involves three repeating events: 1) fragmentary ideas come into your mind; 2) you change your world by writing the fragments down; 3) your world (written words) provides you new ideas when you read and interpret what you have written. The cycle repeats when you write down your next ideas.

The feedback loop treats writing not as resulting from complete sentences arising from inspiration but rather as a writer’s constant search for meaning which begins by exploring fragments which they have written down already. “The Latin root of the word invent means ‘to find’. And since you cannot know what you have to say until you have said it, writers of both fiction and nonfiction ‘invent’ through finding” (Koch, 2003, p. 14, his italics).

The ‘finding’ Koch describes seems more embodied than the disembodied inspiration described by Housman. The feedback loop required by fragmentary inspiration moves some ‘writing’ from inside the mind to outside in the world. Writing now includes the world because the feedback loop requires what writers have already written in the world to affect their later ideas.

The feedback loop required by fragmentary inspiration relates writing to another idea from embodied cognitive science, cognitive scaffolding. Cognitive scaffolding occurs when objects in the world aid or replace mental processing (Clark, 1997). For instance, when a student takes lecture notes, they replace their internal memory with an environmental record. Lecture notes scaffold memory. Cognitive scaffolds belong to embodied cognitive science because scaffolds exist in the world, not in the disembodied mind.

Cognitive scaffolding plays an important role in writing. Many writers use, and many books about writing recommend using, notebooks or index cards to record ideas when they occur (Ahrens, 2022; Atchity, 1995; Brande, 1934; Butler & Burroway, 2005; Cameron, 2022; Goldberg, 1986; Heighton, 2011; Hemingway, 1964; Janzer, 2016; Koch, 2003; Lamott, 1995; Lowes, 1927; Luhmann, 1992; Raab, 2010; Rhodes, 1995; Swain, 1974). Notebooks illustrate prototypical cognitive scaffolds.

How do scaffolds like notebooks aid writing? Scaffolds reduce demands on (internal) thinking. For example, writers use notebooks to scaffold memory by jotting down ideas as soon as they occur. Keeping the idea in memory, and recording it later, is too risky: “I used to think that if something was important enough, I’d remember it until I got home, where I could simply write it down in my notebook like some normal functioning member of society. But then I wouldn’t” (Lamott, 1995, p. 127). With a notebook, you don’t have to retrieve an idea from memory; instead, you simply read your notebook to remember the idea.

Furthermore, embodied cognitive scientists recognize when you move ideas from your mind to your world, you can scaffold more than your memory. When you attach ideas to objects in the world, you scaffold additional thinking processes, because embodied cognitive scientists view thinking as physically manipulating objects. Your world not only can your memory, but your actions on your world can generate new ideas for your writing. Cognitive scaffolds introduce a radical new idea: your world literally becomes part of your mind (Clark, 1997, 2008a; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Shapiro, 2019).

Despite Chapter 1’s appeal to ideas like ‘feedback loop’ and ‘cognitive scaffolding’, you do not need to understand embodied cognition to take advantage of what it offers writing. For example, many students comfortably take notes to scaffold their memory without needing to understand embodied cognition. You can feel reassured, though, by knowing embodied cognition helps explain why scaffolds for writing work.