social and cognitive dimensions carter 1990

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The Idea of Expertise: An Exploration of Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Writing Author(s): Michael Carter Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Oct., 1990), pp. 265-286Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357655Accessed: 25-08-2014 01:53 UTC

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The Idea of Expertise: An Exploration of Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Writing

Michael Carter

Every day in our composition classes we answer the questions, what does it mean to be an expert writer and how do writers become experts. The goals of our classes indicate what we think expertise in writing is, and the way we teach indicates how we think writers achieve expertise. I am sure that there are many possible answers to these questions about expertise in writing, but

right now our profession is faced with two apparently opposing answers. Cog- nitive rhetoric, founded on information-processing theories of psychology, proposes a concept of composition that stresses general knowledge. Social rhetoric, based on social theories of knowledge, suggests a concept that stresses local knowledge. And this distinction is reflected in their different ideas of ex-

pertise in writing. Let's look first at the idea of expertise as general knowledge. In her

groundbreaking article, "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing," Patricia Bizzell accuses cognitivists Linda Flower and John R. Hayes of overemphasizing the "universal, fundamental structures of thought and language" (215). But, according to Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, this universality is precisely the strength of cognitive psychology. In Human Problem Solving, the bible of cognitive psychology, Newell and Simon unashamedly declare their theory "reductionistic" (9). It is a conscious attempt to counter other work in psychology, such as clinical and

experimental, which tends to focus on the individual. Though it "leads natu-

rally to constructing information processing systems that model the behavior of a single individual in a single task situation," its goal "is to say with preci- sion what is common to all human information processors" (10). The power of the information-processing approach is that it allows its advocates to make dramatic claims about the way all individuals work in many different situations. This focus on the universal is underscored by the use of oral protocol analysis, which Newell and Simon identify as "a sort of hallmark of the infor-

Michael Carter teaches English at North Carolina State University. He has published articles on writing and rhetoric in College English, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. He thanks Carolyn Miller and Cheryl Geisler for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 41, No. 3, October 1990 265



266 College Composition and Communication 41 (October 1990)

mation processing approach." Protocols are used "for verifying the theory" (12, my emphasis). Thus, the individual subject is treated as a way of testing universal theories of problem solving. It is no surprise, then, that cognitive theories of composition should stress relatively general knowledge, defining expertise in writing as the ability to bring to a writing task certain rich, well- developed, general strategies that guide the process and increase the chances for success (e.g., Flower and Hayes).

According to social theorists, however, all this talk of universal and individual ignores the most important dimension of human activity-the local dimension. I take the adjective from Clifford Geertz's Local Knowledge, but it encompasses a broad social movement including social constructionism, Marxism, and the sociology of knowledge. Because there has been so much about this movement in the composition literature recently (e.g., Bruffee; Faigley; Berlin), I need not offer a detailed review here. Suffice it to say that local refers to the claim that knowledge is constituted by a community and that writing is a function of a discourse community. Among social theorists, then, the preferred research methodology is ethnography because it allows the researcher to focus on writing within a particular community and to make claims primarily about that community. Social theorists define an expert writer as one who has attained the local knowledge that enables her to write as a member of a discourse community.

It is certainly not difficult to understand why these schools of composition are at odds. From the local perspective of social theorists, the emphasis on general knowledge is a naive reduction of writing to a set of procedures, ig- noring the crucial historical and cultural influences of the contexts in which writers write. Discourse should always be defined by its context, and novice writers should be initiated into a discourse community by studying the con- ventions of that community and the way writing is used in that community. From the perspective of cognitive theorists, the emphasis on local knowledge posits a concept of composition that jeopardizes the possibility for pedagogy. As Richard Young argued in a similar setting, a teachable theory of writing demands a generic conception of writing so that writers can be taught general heuristics that can be transferred from one writing task to another ("Arts" 345). But if writing is an exclusively local phenomenon, there are no generic rules that can guide the act because it is different in every "locality." It is an atomistic view of discourse, a vision of chaos for cognitivists.

Thus, cognitive and social rhetorics portray vastly different views of expertise in writing, what writing is, and how to teach it. However, like most academic dichotomies, I think this one also is false: neither the general nor the local perspective alone provides a complete picture of the complexity of writing. And indeed, as I will point out below, recent calls for unifying elements of cognitive and social rhetorics suggest that some composition theorists recognize the limitations of each. But the problem is how to build a unity without sacrificing the integrity and value of both rhetorics.



The Idea of Expertise 267

In this paper I will offer a partial solution to this problem, a theory of expertise that embraces both the general and the local. One result of such a theory may be the reduction of differences between cognitive and social rhetorics, but I must emphasize that my goal is modest, certainly no grand unified theory of composition. The relative generality of knowledge is not the only feature that separates cognitive and social rhetorics. But a pluralistic theory of expertise in writing does offer one approach to understanding writing and the teaching of writing as an interaction of both social and cognitive dimensions.

General Knowledge versus Local Knowledge: An Overview

The conflict between general and local knowledge is certainly not new to education. In fact, one of the best ways to understand the differences between the two is to look at recent shifts in theories of education. At the beginning of this century, pedagogy was founded on the principle of general knowledge as educators conceived of learning chiefly as a mental discipline that could be applied to performance in many areas. This was the muscle metaphor of learning, and the best-known of the training regimens of the mind was Latin. But this general theory of expertise, that the powers acquired in learning Latin would improve performance in other fields, was undermined by the psychologist E.L. Thorndike whose research in transfer of learning demonstrated that learning in one area, however general, has little or no effect on the performance in another area. Thorndike's studies successfully challenged the muscle metaphor of the mind and encouraged educators to develop curricula that focused on local concepts of education-specific instruction in specific areas- which led to the rise of the practical education movement (Glaser, "Educa- tion" 93; Bransford et al. 1078-79).

Midway through this century, however, the foundations for a new generalism were laid. In 1945, Gyorgy Polya published the very influential How to Solve It, which suggested that successful problem solving in mathematics (and, by implication, elsewhere) depended on a repertory of general heuristic strategies that could be applied to a wide variety of problems. In 1950, Benjamin S. Bloom and Lois J. Broder published Problem-Solving Processes of College Stu- dents, a study that demonstrated that education places too much emphasis on right answers and not enough on the strategies that help students find the right answers. And around 1957, Allen Newell, J.P. Shaw, and Herbert Simon programmed a computer to "think" the way people think, not by pure algorithm nor by pure trial and error but by heuristics. The original "thinking" program was GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER, which could solve a variety of problems using means-end analysis as its primary heuristic strategy; the claim was that GENERAL PROBLEM SOLVER achieved broad generality without any loss of specific problem-solving power (Ernst and Newell; Newell and Simon 414-38).




The implications of this research and the avalanche of related research that followed were all too clear: human performance is based largely on underlying strategic processes that can be isolated, studied, and taught; successful performance is a result of the application of powerful heuristic strategies. The ruling metaphor was no longer mind as muscle but mind as information processor, a symbol manipulator that functions to reduce uncertainty. This was a powerful theory of performance because it was so economical and elegant and because it lent itself so easily to computer simulation. Local knowledge was simply "noise," a few relatively trivial precepts or rules that were managed by general heuristics (Perkins and Salomon 17). This focus on general knowledge resulted in the rise of process education during the seventies, characterized by courses in problem-solving techniques designed to improve performance in most facets of life (e.g., Hayes, Complete; Rubinstein). Like Latin, but based on a much more sophisticated theory, these courses promised a general approach to human learning-broad, transferable powers that could be beneficially applied to most any specific task.

The general-process movement rested on three related assumptions: (1) that the difference between the performance of experts and novices is that experts possess more effective general strategies than novices, (2) that general knowledge is more powerful than local knowledge, and (3) that general strategies are transferable from one domain to another. However, the crest on which the process movement was riding soon gave way as each of these assumptions was shaken by an increasing recognition among psychologists of the value of local, or domain-specific, knowledge. One source of this recognition was the study of unusual expertise in children. For instance, researchers found that though ten-year-old children who play tournament chess exhibit typically lower recall capability than college students who were chess novices, the recall of chess positions of the children (an indication of proficiency in the game) was far su- perior to the older subjects. In contrast to the Piagetian focus on the natural stages of development, this research showed that the domain-specific knowledge of identifying chess positions enabled these children to excel in chess to a greater level than their chronological development would suggest. This study and many others suggested that the intellectual development of children according to certain stages may be advanced in specific domains by greater experience within that domain (Bransford et al. 1079-80; Glaser, "Education" 97-98).

An even more powerful case for the influence of local knowledge on problem solving has been drawn by researchers who explore the differences between adult experts and novices. There have been many expert-novice studies (see Chi, Glaser, and Rees; Glaser, "Education"), but the seminal study, per- formed by deGroot on chess masters and less experienced players, best illustrates what has been learned. DeGroot began his research with the assumption that masters were better players because they could think of more possible moves and could think more moves ahead of the lesser chess players. However,




deGroot discovered that neither of these hypotheses was correct: there was actually little quantitative difference between the masters and others. This forced deGroot to investigate qualitative differences. He showed his subjects a number of different configurations of pieces on a chessboard, each configura- tion for five seconds, and discovered that the masters were much better at re- constructing the configurations than the less experienced players. A follow-up study by Chase and Simon proved that the difference between masters and relative novices was not based on the possession of a greater short-term memory, for when the pieces were placed on the board at random there was no significant difference between the performances of groups. It was only when the board configurations were meaningful that the chess masters could remember them so accurately. In fact, Chase and Simon estimated that grand master chess players possess about fifty thousand meaningful chess configurations in their repertories, allowing them to play the game effectively based on the rapid recognition of playing situations.

This research showed that mastery at chess was less a function of any general strategies or abilities than it was a function of specific knowledge of the game achieved only after many years of experience. Similar studies of expertise in other areas-such as physics, mathematics, computer programming, and medicine-strengthened this conclusion: expertise is founded on local knowledge; experts are successful in their fields because they bring to their performance domain-specific knowledge attained through much experience within that domain. As expert-novice research undercut the assumption that expertise is determined by general knowledge, so other research undercut the other assumptions of generalism. Work in artificial intelligence demonstrated that general heuristics were much less effective when applied to problems in specific domains than "expert systems," programs that relied on domain-specific "knowledge." And further research on transfer of knowledge offered largely negative results: the mastery of knowledge in one domain has little significant effect on performance in another domain (Brooks and Dansereau 131-34; Mayer 344-45; Perkins and Salomon 18-19). All of this pointed to an over- whelming case for the value of local knowledge in expertise.

An Argument for General and Local Knowledge

Thus far I have presented two opposing theories of expertise. The general- process movement emphasized general knowledge at the expense of local knowledge, which seemed only incidental to performance. But this model of expertise was superceded by a model that emphasized local knowledge at the expense of general knowledge, which seemed elementary at best and counter- productive at worse. But the story does not end there. In "Are Cognitive Skills Context-Bound?" D.N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon review the argu- ments of both positions and find "that each camp, in its own way, has over-




simplified the interaction between general strategic knowledge and specialized domain knowledge" (16). Their position reflects a growing recognition of the complexity of human performance and the necessity for a synthesis of general and local knowledge in a pluralistic theory of expertise.

Because of the strength of the case for local knowledge, the foundation for a pluralistic theory rests on a reconsideration of the role of general knowledge. And the evidence reviewed by Perkins and Salomon suggests that general knowledge is indeed necessary for a full theory of expertise. First, it has been shown that experts turn to relatively general strategies when they are faced with unusual problems in their field, problems that "do not yield to the most straightforward approaches." This does not mean that these general strategies act as a substitute for local knowledge. "On the contrary, the general heuristics operate in a highly contextualized way, accessing, [sic] and wielding sophisticated domain knowledge" (20).

Second, there is also evidence that general strategies are valuable for learning. When students are taught such strategies in a way that emphasizes both their contextual use and their control through self-monitoring procedures, the students exhibit a dramatic improvement in their performance within a particular context (Perkins and Salomon 20-21). This evidence suggests that there are strategies of intermediate generality that, when learned and applied within a broad knowledge domain, can affect performance in that domain (Perkins and Salomon 17). In addition, general-process stategies are useful in helping learners to acquire local knowledge. Novices, because they are new to a knowledge domain, must rely on certain global strategies to act on whatever limited knowledge they possess about the domain. But these general strategies allow the novice to gain more and more specific knowledge of, and thus greater effectiveness in, the domain. The latest generation of artificial-intelligence research is taking advantage of this insight to create "learning" computers, combining general strategies and specialized "knowledge." Thus, when the expert system encounters a problem it cannot solve with the data it possesses, it becomes a learner, resorting to heuristic strategies which allow it to accu- mulate the domain-specific data that increase its base of local "knowledge" (Perkins and Salomon 21; Waldrop).

And third, some research shows that transfer of learning, the ability to gen- eralize from performance in one specific context to performance in another context, is possible but only under special conditions, "such as cuing, practic- ing, generating abstract rules, socially developing explanations and principles, conjuring up analogies . . . " (Perkins and Salomon 22). Such conditions may not be typical of everyday life or the laboratory, but they are appropriate to the classroom. Perkins and Salomon have found that there are two ways of at- taining some transfer of learning. The "low road" to transfer requires that the learner practice a skill in a variety of similar contexts to the point of near auto- maticity. Then, when faced with a similar but otherwise unfamiliar context, many learners will respond by generalizing from previous experience to the




new experience. The "high road" to transfer entails the teaching of abstract principles that govern performance in a particular context. This kind of transfer demands that the learner decontextualize the principles for application in a different context, which for most learners requires prompting (22).

Thus, the value of general knowledge may be summed up this way: it provides novices some guidance in performing in unfamiliar domains; it provides the means for accumulating local knowledge within a domain; it provides strategies for performing in related domains; and it provides general strategies for solving atypical problems in a specific domain. But this statement of the value of general knowledge is by no means a call to revert to the heyday of the general-process movement. The claims of that movement were clearly overstated. The fresh look at generalism does, however, suggest that the claims for local knowledge have also been overstated. Human performance may not be founded on a set of underlying general strategies, but neither is it determined by an array of isolated microworlds, each separated from the others by its special knowledge. Rather, human performance is a complex interaction of general and local knowledge.

A Pluralistic Theory of Expertise

What is required, then, is a pluralistic theory of expertise, one that accounts for the value of both general and local knowledge. One possible blueprint for such a theory may be found in Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's Mind Over Ma- chine, a book that seeks to demonstrate why artificial intelligence will never achieve full human intelligence. Part of their argument revolves around the idea of expertise, particularly the development of expertise in five stages. In Stage One, the novice applies "context-free rules," which means that novice performance is based on a set of global strategies that can be applied across a broad range of situations. The novice moves to the second, or advanced beginner, stage with the acquisition of more sophisticated strategies learned by applying the general strategies in specific situations. What happens is that the strategies become more context-specific. Stage Three, or competence, comes with more experience in the domain. It is marked by a reduced reliance on general strategies and an increased reliance on hierarchical decision-making procedures which allow the performer to choose between applying strategies and responding to the variables in a situation. Such procedures lead to a marked improvement in performance.

The fourth stage is proficiency. Up to this point the learner's performance has been largely governed by relatively general strategies; even when the learner did not apply these strategies it was the result of a conscious decision based on a perceived goal. To go beyond competence is to go beyond the reliance on general stategies. At this stage, performance relies more on "holistic similarity recognition" than on the conscious decomposition of the features of a situa-




tion, more on know-how and intuition than on a carefully reasoned process. In other words, performance is based on the recognition of familiar situational patterns that are formed after much experience (just as chess masters act on the recognition of a particular pattern on the chess board rather than on an analysis of the situation). However, intuition by no means suggests irrational behavior; rather, it means acting on the principles established by previous experience. Expertise, the final stage, is marked by fluid performance that is seldom based on analytic, conscious deliberation. The performance is so much a part of the performer that she is not really aware of it; experts simply do what works. There is little need to analyze a situation into decision and action because the expert has built up a large repertory of situations, each of which encompasses decision and action. Experts react intuitively to most situations, relying not on rules or plans or strategies but on the familiarity that comes from experience (16-36).

This description of the development of expertise suggests a way to understand the interaction of general and specific knowledge. Dreyfus and Dreyfus suggest that experts slough off the rules and strategies that guided earlier performance because they are no longer necessary: experts base their performance on the intuition that is derived from a great deal of experience with special cases. But instead of dismissing general strategies altogether, Dreyfus and Dreyfus show that such strategies allow novices to gain experience in a domain and thus, with enough experience, to develop the pattern recognition that characterizes expertise. Problem-solving strategies may be associated primarily with novice, advanced beginner, and competent performance, but without some guidance, a novice would never be able to become an expert, transform- ing context-free knowledge into context-specific knowledge.

The developmental continuum of Dreyfus and Dreyfus is reflected in other explanations of the process of gaining expertise. Robert Glaser, for instance, describes the journey from novice to expert as the acquisition of increasingly sophisticated schemata. A schema "is a source of prediction ... [that] enables individuals to make assumptions about events that generally occur in a particular situation." Experts are experts because they possess very highly organized schemata, developed over a long time, that are related to a specific field. Novices are novices because they do not possess such sophisticated schemata, because of "the inadequacies of their knowledge bases . .. .rather than] the limitations in their processing capabilities such as the inability to use problem- solving heuristics" ("Education" 99-100). But Glaser says that all the work in problem-solving research cannot be ignored: people do rely on process strategies. Novices, because they lack the sophisticated schemata of experts, must depend on general strategies for their performance. Glaser points out that such processes-like "chunking, problem representation, and general cognitive strategies"-although they may not have the power of domain- specific knowledge, are "fundamental to the acquisition of skill" ("All's Well" 573).




John R. Anderson portrays the shift from novice to expert as the transfor- mation of declarative knowledge (verbalizable data gathered from previous experience) into procedural knowledge (internalized knowledge about working within a specific domain). According to Anderson, general strategies "enable the initial performance and impose a goal structure on the performance so that the knowledge compilation process can operate successfully" (206). This means, first, that they are applied to declarative knowledge as a guide to performance in an unfamiliar domain; without these "weak methods" there would be no way to perform in unfamiliar domains. And second, they allow the learner who wants to become more expert to acquire the experience that could lead to procedural knowledge, the process of knowledge compilation. The need for general strategies diminishes as the learner's knowledge becomes more procedural, but they are not necessarily eliminated. They can be applied again in situations that may not be covered by the procedural knowledge (196-97).

This developmental continuum offers one way to understand the interaction between general and local knowledge. As people gain greater experience in a particular domain, their performance in that domain relies on knowledge that becomes more and more local, less and less general. However, this continuum takes on added significance when it is also seen as a continuum of the relative generality of knowledge. Between the extremes of the global general knowledge of the rank novice and the fluent use of local knowledge by the expert, there is a range of knowledge that becomes increasingly local, of strategies that become increasingly domain-specific. Let's take as an example a problem in the field of nuclear engineering. Research shows than novices and experts will approach that problem differently. A novice would have to resort to the most general of heuristic strategies, such as means-end analysis, analogy, hill climbing, etc., to be able to perform at all. The experienced nuclear engineer, though, would rely on her local knowledge to solve the problem. But to suggest that the knowledge that guides performance must be one of these two extremes is to miss its complexity. A mechanical engineer, faced with the same problem, would be able to apply knowledge more specialized than that of the novice but not as specialized as the nuclear engineer, using knowledge appropriate to engineering. And the engineer who is just beginning a career in nuclear engineering would be able to apply knowledge more specialized than the mechanical engineer but not as specialized as his more experienced colleague.

This concept of the relative generality of knowledge helps to explain much of the revaluation of generalism. At its broadest, it redeems the whole idea of general heuristic strategies. If general knowledge is limited only to the most global strategies, the province of novices or inveterate puzzle solvers, then it commands little interest or respect. But if general knowledge is understood as functioning contextually and, indeed, providing powerful means for accumulating additional local knowledge, then it is worthy of respect and further study. More specifically, the continuum of general and local knowledge




also explains much of the research that supports the new generalism. Teaching relatively general strategies within a context can lead to improved specific performance within that context because the general knowledge is used contextually. The improvement of domain performance through contextually learned strategies, the use of relatively general strategies by experts solving atypical problems in their fields, and the evidence of some transfer of knowledge between related domains-these results make sense only if the performance of subjects were guided by strategies derived from a knowledge of intermediate generality, not the global, a-contextual strategies of the novice. Thus, a theory of expertise that focuses exclusively on local knowledge is a limited theory. Certainly, the fluent performance of someone experienced in a domain is a function of local knowledge. But local knowledge alone cannot account for the relatively effective performance in a domain by those who do not possess the local knowledge of that domain.

What is needed, then, is a pluralistic theory of expertise that embraces both general and local knowledge; conceiving of expertise as a continuum offers one possibility for achieving that pluralism because the continuum graphically represents both the developmental relationship between general and local knowledge and the principle of relative generality of knowledge. But this theory of expertise also demands a broader definition of expertise, one that reflects the value of both general and local knowledge. Thinking of expertise only in terms of local knowledge reduces expertise to one dimension and diminishes the value of knowledge that is more general. Indeed, as the research on experts solving atypical problems in their fields suggests, the idea of expertise simply as local knowledge is limited. "Presumably," Perkins and Salomon observe, "in many domains, people become experts not just to function as technicians solving new variants of the classic problems but to open the field further" (20). In fact, the expertise of performers who are limited only to the experience they already have, who do not possess the flexibility to use more general knowledge on unusual problems within their specific domains or on problems within their general domains, may be better described as merely a knack. True experts should have a command of the general knowledge useful within the context of their fields, the general strategies that function in a contextual way and allow them to contribute to the local knowledge of the field, to increase, question, or change the knowledge that constitutes the domain. Expertise, then, demands a greater flexibility than the strict reliance on local knowledge. The expertise of local knowledge is important, but a broad concept of expertise must also reflect the value of knowledge that is more general.

A Theory of Expertise in Writing

Applied to writing, this pluralistic theory of expertise points toward a common ground between cognitive and social theories of composition because it




shows how writing embraces both general and local knowledge. The possibility for such a common ground is certainly not new to composition. For instance, Patricia Bizzell says, "Answers to what we need to know about writing will have to come from both the inner-directed and the outer-directed the- oretical schools if we wish to have a complete picture of the composing process. We need to explain the cognitive and the social factors in writing development, and even more important, the relationship between them" (219). Marilyn Cooper and Michael Holzman take issue with the use of oral protocol analysis as a research tool but find hope for writing research in other approaches to cognitive psychology, such as scripts, plans, and goals (292). Lester Faigley offers a taxonomy that distinguishes cognitive from social theories of process but then concludes with a suggestion for linking the social and the cognitive by using the social view to "demonstratte] the historical origins of an individual writer's goals" (538). Linda Flower, the target of most of the attacks by social compositionists, admits that the meaning of a text is at least in part a function of a discourse community and calls for an "interactive" theory of composition ("Cognition"; "Construction" 538). And David Bartholomae cites another discussion by psychologist David Perkins as proof that social theorists need not "break faith with the enterprise of cognitive science" (143).

It is Bartholomae's insight into cognitive science that I find most intrigu- ing because it so clearly supports the case I am making here. Perkins, Bartholomae says, "has argued that 'the higher the level of competence con- cerned,' as in the case of adult learning, 'the fewer general cognitive control strategies there are.' There comes a point, that is, where 'field-specific' or 'domain-specific' schemata . . . become more important than general problem- solving processes" (143-44). Bartholomae finds hope in Perkins's statement because it demonstrates that cognitive psychologists are not wed to the notion that all human behavior is directed chiefly by general cognitive strategies. This understanding is largely a consequence of the expert-novice research I have described and the resulting increased awareness, even among formerly staunch advocates of general strategies, of the crucial role of domain-specific knowledge. John R. Hayes, for example, says:

If skill in chess, musical composition, and painting depends on large amounts of knowledge, it is easy to predict that there are other skills that do so as well, for example, skills in writing poetry, fiction, or expository prose, and skill in science, history, and athletics as well as many others. Strategies may help in acquiring or executing such skills. However, it is unlikely that the use of strategies can circumvent the need to spend large amounts of time acquiring a knowledge base for such skills. ("Three Problems" 399)

The theory of expertise in writing that I will offer here suggests a way of claiming the common ground between cognitive and social theories of composition in a way that both sides can occupy it. Social theorists will find com-




fort in the idea that not all behavior is directed by general strategies. They will also find comfort in the understanding that the concept of domain-specific knowledge strongly implies a community of the knowledgeable, a community defined by the common possession of certain kinds of knowledge. Cognitive theorists will find comfort in the fact that much of the research on domain- specific knowledge has come out of cognitive psychology and in the fact that a full theory of expertise still emphasizes the value of general strategies, the traditional foundation of cognitive research. Thus, a theory of expertise in writing must account for the role of both general and local knowledge. A theory that emphasizes one at the expense of the other is only a partial theory. In the rest of this paper, I will outline one such theory and then suggest a way to apply that theory to teaching writing.

A Theory of Expertise in Writing Must Account for the Role of Local Knowledge.

The idea that local knowledge is important to writing is a revolutionary idea that is best understood in the context of recent composition history. Current- traditional rhetoric was (and I use the past tense loosely) a general theory of composition; good writing was good writing, regardless of audience, genre, purpose, etc. Current-traditional pedagogy focused on the elements upon which all good writing was supposedly founded-rules of grammar, style, and arrangement, the surface features of a text. Expertise was considered the ability to write in a way that reflected these prescriptions, which were generaliza- ble to (and indeed the criteria for quality in) all discourse.

The process movement of the seventies had a profound effect on composition, shifting the emphasis of pedagogy from surface features of the text to the writing process, a shift that has been hailed as revolutionary (Hairston; Young, "Paradigms"). Viewed from another perspective, however, the process revolution was not all that revolutionary. It was founded on information- processing theory which, as I have shown, offers a view of human performance as based on domain-general processes. Thus, the underlying principle of process rhetoric was that expertise in writing is the ability to bring to a writing task certain rich, well-developed strategies that guide the process and increase the chances for success. Its pedagogy was also founded on general knowledge: composition teachers were to teach heuristic strategies in the belief that these strategies could be applied to and improve performance in all kinds of discourse. Process rhetoric may have been much more sophisticated and powerful than current-traditional rhetoric, but it was equally dependent on general knowledge.

The theory of expertise that I have presented challenges this exclusively general concept of expertise in writing by identifying the crucial role of local knowledge. To understand the difference in these concepts of expertise, it will be helpful to return to the early studies of Flower and Hayes, who contrasted the processes of "novice" and "expert" writers performing the same task-




writing an article for Seventeen magazine describing what the writer does for a living. Oral protocol analyses revealed that the expert writers brought to their tasks strategies that were more elaborate, more complex, and more powerful than the strategies of the novices. From these results Flower and Hayes suggested, quite logically, that in order to help students become better writers, we should improve their strategies, making them more like the "expert" writers (23-32).

However, if fluent performance depends heavily on local knowledge, as the theory says, then we may find an alternative understanding for the study's "experts" and "novices": (1) that both groups were relative novices in that writing domain; (2) that true experts would have been specialists in writing in that domain, say, contributing editors to Seventeen; (3) that the oral protocols of these true experts would not have exhibited such explicit use of heuristic strategies because in experts such strategies have been abbreviated and abstracted to the extent that they would no longer be observable; (4) that the difference between the "experts" and "novices" was not based on expertise as defined by the possession of local knowledge but on the application of more sophisticated problem-solving strategies; and (5) that if the "novice" writers in the experi- ment had been studying Seventeen and had extensive practice in writing for that magazine, they would have been considered more expert than the "experts." Lester Faigley voices a similar concern: "From a social perspective, a major shortcoming in studies that contrast expert and novice writers lies not so much in the artificiality of the experimental situation, but in the assumption that expertise can be defined outside of a specific community of writers. Since individual expertise varies across communities, there can be no one definition of an expert writer" (535).

One problem with the cognitive-process theory of composition, then, is that it defines expertise in writing strictly by general strategies, not the specialized abilities described by the recent research in expertise. This is why social theories of composition are so important: they provide a way to understand writing as a local phenomenon and thus offer a truly revolutionary approach to composition. Unlike the generalism of current-traditional and cognitive-process rhetorics, social theories of rhetoric are specialized; they show how writing is related to the domain-specific knowledge that plays such a crucial role in local expertise.

The importance of this local concept of writing has become clear to many scholars in composition. For instance, Lester Faigley and Kristine Hansen state that writing across the curriculum challenges the monolithic notion of "good writing." They recommend that English teachers "adopt a rhetorical approach to the study of writing in the disciplines" because writing is "a form of social action" that is intimately associated with a discipline (148-49). James A. Reither also condemns the usual composition practice of having students write in a-rhetorical situations. He says that we should help our students enter particular academic communities, each community defined by "its




knowledge and its modes of knowing" (624). And others, such as Elaine Maimon and Leslie E. Moore and Linda H. Peterson, portray writing in a specific discipline as an apprenticeship in which the writer moves toward expertise by mastering the ways of thinking and writing of that discipline. The theory I have outlined supports this specialization in composition by showing that local knowledge is crucial to an understanding of writing. But local knowledge alone cannot account for the complex nature of written discourse.

A Theory of Expertise in Writing Must Account for the Role of General Knowledge.

I am arguing for a pluralistic theory of expertise, one that reflects the value of both general and local knowledge. The main problem with social theories of composition is that, though they have shown us how to understand the role of local knowledge in writing, they have done so at the expense of general knowledge. One reason for this exclusive focus on local knowledge is that the social concept of discourse community has been so heavily influenced by the sociolinguistic concept of the speech community. Dell Hymes, an influential sociolinguist, defines speech community as "a community sharing knowledge of rules for the conduct and interpretation of speech. Such sharing comprises knowledge of at least one form of speech, and knowledge also of its patterns of use" (51). A speech community is more than just a shared language, say, Spanish; it is characterized by a way of speaking, say, among people living in a certain neighborhood or working in a certain trade in Mexico City. Indeed, Hymes makes it clear that people who share the same form of speech may be un- intelligible to each other because they do not share the same way of speaking (49-50). The focus of sociolinguistics, then, is profoundly cultural and contextual, a local theory of linguistics.

This theory has contributed much to the idea of the discourse community, but the benefits derived from applying the concept of speech community to writing are limited because, like most linguistic theories, it is primarily con- cerned with the native speaker who is, in this case, naturally a member of a speech community. Martin Nystrand, citing Hymes, says that membership in a speech community is the result of becoming "a fluent native speaker through the process of socialization, that is, by becoming a member of the 'tribe' .. " (1). The paradigm of socialization suggests that people become members of a speech community by unconsciously absorbing the ways of speaking that define the community. In fact, Hymes notes that both the form of a first language and the knowledge of ways of using that language are usually "acquired and maintained together" (49).

This focus on the "fluent native speaker" is appropriate to linguistics, whose goal is to find out how language works and whose best means for achieving that goal is the study of such "experts." And sociolinguistics has made a significant contribution to linguistic theory by demonstrating that speech is not monolithic and that speech communities are crucial to under-




standing how language works. The discourse community has made a similar contribution to writing theory. But the exclusive focus on local knowledge, though appropriate to speech, is not appropriate to writing because whereas speech is a natural act, writing is, as James Raymond has reminded us, an unnatural one. Everyone who is physically and mentally capable acquires the local expertise of at least one speech community through the natural process of socialization. Writing, of course, does not come so naturally; it must be learned. Far from universal, local expertise is possessed by only a relatively few people in any writing domain. And this is true even in our own literate society. Thus, socialization into a writing domain is only a partial explanation of how writers acquire local knowledge. Because of the unnaturalness of writing, we need to look for other explanations that will help us to guide writers in the acquisition of the local knowledge of a writing domain. The idea of general knowledge offers such an explanation.

Aside from the development of local expertise, another problem with an exclusively local theory of writing is that it does not adequately explain writing outside the domain of local knowledge. If my claim that few people possess the local knowledge of a writing domain is true, then most writing is done outside the realm of local knowledge. And even those who have attained local expertise in a writing domain do much of their writing outside that domain. Such writing-and it is often effective-must be based on something besides local knowledge. I must emphasize, though, that this assertion does not question the idea that all writing takes place within a domain. That is certainly true. Yet there is a difference between the claim that all writing takes place in a domain and the claim that all writing is directed by the local knowledge of that domain. Local knowledge is the result of a lot of experience in a domain. All other writing in that domain may be accounted for by a reliance on relatively general knowledge.

The great value of social theories of composition is that they have shown us how to understand writing as a function of local knowledge. But the great value of cognitive theories of composition is that they have shown us how to understand writing as a function of general knowledge. It is not difficult, though, to understand why social theorists would dismiss the claims of cognitivists. First, there is the zeal of any revolutionary regime to reject the ten- ets of the preceding regime. Second, the overstated claims of cognitivists, that general procedures were the source of expertise, tended to make social compositionists suspicious of any of the claims of cognitivists. And third, there has been a broad misunderstanding in composition theory as to the nature of general knowledge. If general knowledge is limited only to the most global strategies, those that are characteristic of novice performance in any domain, then they are of limited value to writing. But if general strategies are seen as varying in generality, as becoming more and more context-bound as writers acquire more and more domain-specific knowledge, then general knowledge is useful for writing theory. The problem is that we tend to think of general




strategies only in terms of the greatest generality. But the knowledge that guides performance does not exist as a dichotomy-general strategies on one side and domain-specific knowledge on the other. Rather it is a continuum that grows increasingly contextual with greate; experience, moving from the most global strategies to the local knowledge that guides expert performance.

This recognition of the importance of general knowledge in expertise in writing offers us a way to broaden our view of writing beyond the strictly local. It explains how novices manage to write at all in unfamiliar domains: they apply global strategies such as means-end analysis and analogy, strategies that could guide novice performance in practically any domain. It explains how writers attain the local knowledge of a particular domain: the application of general strategies in a domain allows writers to acquire more local knowledge and thus to rely less on general strategies. It explains how writers who are experienced in one domain can write effectively in related domains: they possess relatively general strategies that are transferable to similar domains. And it explains how fluent writers in a domain perform successfully in atypical writing tasks within their domain: they possess highly contextualized strategies that they can rely on when the writing task challenges their local knowledge. General knowledge, then, is crucial to a more complete understanding of writing.

A Theory of Expertise and the Teaching of Writing

I began this paper with the proposition that what we do in our writing class- rooms is determined, implicitly or explicitly, by our concepts of what it means to be an expert writer and how writers attain expertise. Our theories of expertise determine the goals of our writing classes and how we achieve those goals. Though we are offered two apparently opposing ideas of expertise by cognitive-process theories and social theories, I have tried to demonstrate that these are not actually conflicting views of writing but are, indeed, complementary; neither one by itself gives a full account of the complexity of writing. In this section I will explore some of the implications for teaching suggested by this pluralistic theory of expertise in writing.

First, let's look at the goals of writing pedagogy. The theory I have described suggests a broad concept of expertise. Instead of seeing expertise in writing only as it is reflected in the performance of experts-that is, local knowledge-it is necessary also to take into account the value of general knowledge. Thus, it is possible to speak in terms of two kinds of expertise, general and local, a position that reflects the value of both. We can define general expertise as the possession of knowledge that allows writers to perform effectively when they have no appropriate local knowledge to depend on or when the local knowledge they possess is not effective. This view of writing in no way diminishes the value of local knowledge; it simply asserts that general




knowledge is also valuable and has an important place in our ideas of what it means to be an expert writer.

One teaching goal, then, is to aid our students in the acquisition of general knowledge about writing. The other goal is to help our students to acquire appropriate local knowledge, to become a part of a writing community as defined by certain domain-specific knowledge. Writers who possess this local expertise can work fluently in a domain without having to rely on general strategies. In an academic setting, these domains have been established by departments and specializations within departments. From the perspective of the goal of local expertise, growth in writing means that writing becomes increasingly domain-specific over the four years of an undergraduate career as students become members of the community of knowledge within their academic majors. Because of the constraints of the academic environment, this task requires a somewhat flexible idea of local expertise. It is doubtful that students could attain the local knowledge that would enable them, as undergraduates, to enter as experts the scholarly or professional conversation of their chosen fields. In the case of scholarship, that is what graduate schools are for; in the professions, this requires on-the-job experience or further professional training. However, students can build enough local knowledge to become proficient in writing as advanced undergraduates in their fields. One of our goals as teachers of composition is to help them acquire the local knowledge that will enable them to perform as effectively as possible in their academic major and will lead them to increased local knowledge in their fields after they graduate.

If we are to think of composition as having two goals, then the next consid- eration must be how those goals are related to each other, the relationship between general and local knowledge. I have suggested that this relationship may be represented by a continuum that graphically illustrates both the development from general to local knowledge and the levels of generality of knowledge. One way to apply this continuum to writing is to use the terms that Dreyfus and Dreyfus use to describe the five stages of the development of local expertise. Of course, these stages are artificially imposed on the continuum, but even if they do not denote hard and fast definitions, they do provide a way to describe the levels of generality in writing.

The theory of expertise suggests that novices, people who perform in domains in which they have very little or no local knowledge, must rely on global strategies that are so general they could be used in practically any domain (strategies that are most likely culturally generated). We often see exam- ples of these strategies in some of our students in freshman composition. For instance, there are the students who seize on means-end analysis: they are the ones who press us after class to elaborate as much as possible on what we want in an assignment, or try to get us to identify certain models for them to follow so that they can work backwards from that goal. There are also the students who rely on inappropriate analogies to other writing they have done. For ex-




ample, one student may respond to an expressive writing assignment by fall- ing back on the stiff, distant parody of academic prose that she learned to write in high-school English classes. Another may resort to the five-paragraph theme for every assignment because that is the only writing he knows that is useful in an academic setting. These are weak strategies to be sure, but they certainly cannot be condemned out of hand; without them, some students would not be able to perform at all in the challenging environment of a for- eign domain.

Advanced beginners are students who have acquired strategies that are more specific to writing and therefore need to rely less on the global strategies of the novice. Their experience in reading and writing has helped them to develop strategies appropriate to writing: instead of having to work backwards from a goal or apply an inappropriate analogy, advanced beginners have learned some writing strategies that provide for a less restrictive approach to a writing task, a recognition that writing changes from domain to domain and the ability to write with some effectiveness in different domains. In other words, advanced beginners are not just blindly following global strategies, but they also do not have the control of writing strategies that competent writers have. Competence, the third level, describes writers who have developed the writing skills that enable them to perform capably in a variety of writing domains. They have a firm possession of relatively general writing strategies that give them a great deal of flexibility, for instance strategies for discourse analysis, revision, generating ideas, getting started, overcoming writer's block, deter- mining and writing for audiences, etc. All these are strategies that enable the writer to achieve some success in writing in a domain without extensive experience in that domain. It is this competence in writing that should, perhaps, be the goal of freshman composition.

Beyond the level of competence, it is impossible to talk of improvement in writing without focusing on local knowledge. Competent writers can work within a variety of writing domains with some effectiveness, but it is only when writers work in one or more domains for a while that they begin to develop the local knowledge of that domain. For example, in the college setting that might mean taking business and management courses and a business writing course. Experience in reading and writing business texts and guidance from writing teachers and business teachers help the students to become proficient in writing in that area, to acquire the local knowledge that enables them to write without relying so much on general writing strategies. And as students continue to work in a domain, their knowledge becomes more local as their experience grows and their domain becomes more specific. Business students who major in industrial management attain the local knowledge of writing in their domain as they get jobs and gain further experience in that field. But of course the writers who possess local expertise in a domain must continue to rely on the more general strategies of the competent writer when writing outside that domain.




This continuum is helpful because it describes the complementary relationship between general and local knowledge, because it shows the value to writing of both kinds of knowledge, and because it offers a way to describe how writers learn, a process that moves from general to local knowledge. But it is not very helpful in showing us how to teach general knowledge, a problem that is explored by John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid in "Sit- uated Cognition and the Culture of Learning." One possible solution to teaching general knowledge is to focus our teaching on writing domains that are general. This has been the pedagogical approach of teachers influenced by current-traditional rhetoric, an approach that has encouraged the use of the "English paper," audience-less, purpose-less writing that is ostensibly domain-free so as to concentrate on the writing and not the "content." How- ever, Brown et al. demonstrate that such hybrid school activities "can be un- intentionally antithetical to useful domain learning." They explain: "The system of learning and using (and, of course, testing) thereafter remains hermetically sealed with the self-confirming culture of the school. Conse- quently, contrary to the aim of schooling, success within this culture often has little bearing on performance elsewhere" (34). Another solution to teaching general knowledge is to focus our teaching on the general writing strategies themselves in the expectation that students will learn them and then apply them to their writing. But such a bottom-up approach is also ineffective because, as Brown et al. point out, learning strategies in a decontextualized way destines those strategies to remain inert, tools that students may be able to recall if specifically prompted but will not actually use (33).

Thus the dilemma: how can we teach general knowledge about writing without resorting to either allegedly generic writing domains or decontextualized instruction in strategies? Brown and his colleagues recommend that we focus our teaching not on the ersatz activity of the classroom but on the authentic activity of practitioners. That means that we must recognize that all knowledge and learning is situated, an idea that demands that we make our writing instruction situated as well. Brown et al. call this kind of instruction cognitive apprenticeship, a kind of teaching that places students in authentic learning situations much as a craft apprenticeship places learners in the pro- duction of a craft (37). What is important about cognitive apprenticeship for this discussion is that it shows how students learn general principles from working in specific domains. The learning process begins with the teacher helping the students to build a "scaffolding" for working in the domain by modeling the teacher's own strategies, elaborating on any local knowledge brought to the domain, and showing how the new domain is related to more familiar ones. The students, as they develop some self-confidence in their writing, begin working both on their own and also collaboratively with other students. This collaborative learning is crucial not only because it encourages enculturation but also because it "leads to articulation of strategies, which can




then be discussed and reflected on. This, in turn, fosters generalizing, grounded in the students' situated understanding" (39-40).

Along with cognitive apprenticeship, another key to resolving the dilemma of teaching general knowledge is found in the continuum of general-local knowledge. This continuum suggests that people learn to write by moving from knowledge that is relatively general to knowledge that is relatively local, which indicates that one way to conceive of a series of composition classes is as a movement from general to local knowledge. This movement could be ac- complished by structuring a series of writing classes according to the level of generality of the kinds of writing done from class to class. For example, earlier writing classes could focus on a wide variety of writing-as diverse as a job application, a personal essay, a letter to the editor, an essay exam-in order to encourage students to learn strategies that are beneficial for many kinds of writing. In each writing task the students would be entering a particular domain of discourse, and in each task instruction would proceed according to the guidelines offered by cognitive apprenticeship, first by providing a "scaffolding" so that students could begin working in each domain by focusing on both the knowledge peculiar to that domain and the general strategies that carry over from other domains, and then by encouraging individual and collaborative work so that students could have the opportunity for reflecting on and articulating what they learned.

In a later writing class the focus of teaching could become more local by concentrating on writing just in the academic setting, using the same approach as before but treating the variety of academic and professional writing. Still later classes could become increasingly local, shifting attention to a particular field of writing-such as business and management, arts, technologies, social sciences, humanities-and perhaps even later to a specific kind of writing-such as industrial management, literary criticism, and physics. As instruction becomes more local, there is less emphasis on formal scaffolding techniques and more emphasis on providing students opportunities for writing experience and on helping students to understand the relationship between writing and the academic or professional culture. And, of course, such opportunities will come in writing classes and in classes within the disciplines. After graduation, students will continue to learn about a writing domain by accumulating enough experience so that they will be able to write fluently in that domain. But the instruction and experience that they have obtained in college will enable them to apply effective general strategies outside their particular domains and to acquire the local knowledge of other domains.

I do not think that there is anything radically new about the pedagogy I have just described. Not only does one see in it elements of cognitive and social rhetorics but also influences of collaborative writing, student-centered instruction, and some of the work in writing across the curriculum. What is important, though, is that the theory of expertise in writing that I have offered here provides a structure for uniting many different ideas about writ-




ing. My primary focus, of course, has been on the ideas of expertise expressed in cognitive and social rhetorics, ideas which I have suggested are complementary. However, I am not suggesting that the theory I have offered here lights the way to a complete reconciliation of cognitive and social rhetorics; there are ideological, epistemological, and methodological issues that this theory does not pretend to address (e.g., Berlin; Petrosky; Dobrin). But the theory of expertise in writing does point toward a partial reconciliation by demonstrating that a full understanding of the complex nature of writing demands both general and local knowledge. This is one way of understanding the cognitive and social dimensions of writing.

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