Brand (706-714)

Brand (706-714)

In this essay, Brand discusses the presence of emotion in the writing process.  She states that most writers believe that emotions motivate writing, however, they also believe that emotions do not have much of a role in composing a piece or in the revision of that piece.  Brand, however, believes that emotion must be considered during the composition of a piece of writing.  She says that while critical thinking results in outlines, summaries, deciding what belongs and what doesn’t, etc., it “stops too soon and leaves out too much” (Brand 707).

Brand discusses a cognitive model of writing and the limits of such a model.  She says that composition research needs to look at how much data was lost, what it was, and where it was.  This process would reveal, according to Brand, “imagistic and free associative thinking and connotative commentary” (Brand 709).  Brand believes that this information is necessary to understand the mental process that is behind writing.  There are a few other problems with the model that Brand addresses.  She states that the model suggests that it is possible to distinguish which writers are good and which are weak by looking at their loyalty to the model.   She also states that the model assumes motivation when there is none and that there are not different styles of writing, but rather that one is better than another.  This is not actually true.

In addition to these problems of the cognitive model of writing, Brand also points out the benefits of studying how the emotions affect writing.  She states that by looking at how the emotions effect writing, it may be possible to help people understand why some problems occur during writing and how to solve them.  In addition to this, she also believes that research about “how personality influences the way writers function” (Brand 711) is also important and that it is the future of composition research.  Researching the “affective and cognitive styles through which their writing occurs” is also important to composition research, according to Brand.  This research will help researchers determine why some people are successive in activities related to language while others are not.  While it is known that “effective traits and personality overlap conceptually and empirically” (Brand 711), it was only recently discovered at the time this essay was written that personality had an influence on writing style.  Brand believes that it is important to understand how emotion and cognition work together to form writing.