1.7 Writing With Your World
You think by acting upon your world.
Embodied cognition makes cognitive scaffolding becomes central to cognitive theory. You can scaffold your writing when you treat writing as embodied thinking. I have already mentioned one example, the notebook. By moving your ideas into your notebook, you no longer need to worry about forgetting them. Importantly, written objects can scaffold more than memory by offering you other possible actions. For example, consider Peter Elbow’s cut-and-paste revising method (Elbow, 1981).
Cut-and-paste revising assumes you have drafted paragraphs which you intend to improve. You do so, but not by writing. “You throw away your pen or pencil and revise with nothing but scissors and paste. You will be like a stone sculptor who never adds – only removes” (Elbow, 1981, p. 147).
Cut-and-paste revising requires you to read your draft, find good passages, and use scissors to cut them out. You spread out your clippings, rearrange them; you look for an emerging narrative. You arrange the clippings in their best order. You create a new draft by copying your rearranged clippings, performing what little writing you require to connect fragments together.
Elbow (1981) describes a related method, collage writing, which begins with some completely unconnected writing fragments. In collage writing, you print each fragment out. You arrange the fragments on a table or floor and rearrange them to find the best order. Surprising meaning often emerges from such action. When you use collage writing, “you don’t worry about a thread at all, you just look for quality. You get an implied thread to assert itself by arranging the good bits in the right order” (Elbow, 1981, p. 150, his italics).
Elbow’s two methods presume you have written complete sentences, paragraphs, or passages. However, his methods also work with more fragmentary written objects. Imagine writing short ideas – like Ray Bradbury’s nouns – on their own individual objects, like index cards. Bradbury would search for a pattern in his list. But you could also discover patterns by using the collage method to rearrange index cards to find a surprising thread, while removing index cards which do not seem to fit.
Why might I say rearranging index cards scaffolds more than your memory? Consider the disembodied alternative: not only keeping all your fragmentary ideas in memory at once but also seeking meaningful relationships between them by rearranging them in your mind. When index cards provide scaffolds, you move ideas into your world. Having your ideas in physical format permits you to explore relationships by moving index cards around, by placing cards for related ideas closer to each other – in your world. You no longer remember your ideas, discovering relationships within ideas in your mind. Instead, you simply look at your cards; you see your ideas and their relationships without remembering them or thinking about them. Rearranging index cards in your world permits you to think about your ideas while reducing demands on cognition.
However, to serve as a useful scaffold, index cards – or any other scaffold – must be tailored to the actions an agent can perform. Scaffolds reduce demands on cognition by converting thinking into acting on the world. However, the actions on the world offered by a scaffold must be compatible with the agent’s body. A scaffold offers certain potential actions to an agent whose body can manipulate the scaffold in particular ways. The same scaffold offers different potential actions to an agent with a different body. For a particular agent – a human writer – what potential actions do index cards offer to scaffold writing?
