JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

A great deal of the composition research that has appeared in the professional literature of the past several years has emphasized the dramatic differences between the product-centered curriculum that has traditionally dominated writing courses and the process-centered curriculum that is gradually replacing it.¹ However, in stressing these differences, researchers have often overlooked the special reciprocity that exists between the process-oriented rhetorics that are now emerging and many of the writing assignments that have always been featured in the traditional product-centered curriculum. In doing so, they forfeit the opportunity to explore the ways in which an emerging rhetoric can breath new life into old assignments and old assignments can be used to facilitate the introduction of new approaches to the writing process and its teaching.

Problem-solving, one of the newest approaches to teaching writing, merges especially well with many traditional assignments. It is less concerned with giving writing teachers a completely new subject matter for their courses than with providing them with perspectives on thinking, knowing, and writing to deal more effectively with the writing assignments that have always been at the core of their curricula. Teachers who utilize a problem-solving rhetoric teach many of the same types of essays that they have always taught, but they do so from new angles that make the composing process more clearly an extension of their students' natural cognitive processes.

The problem-solving approach is particularly compatible with the autobiographical essay. Its generic features reflect with unusual clarity the problem-solving rhetoric. This fact makes the autobiographical essay an ideal lead assignment in a problem-solving curriculum, because the students grasp the premises of every essay completed for the course. At the same time, it is in the context of a problem-solving rhetoric that the autobiographical essay can be most effectively taught. When an entire curriculum emphasizes skills that are particularly explicit in a single assignment, teachers can afford to dwell on the features of that assignment more than usual. This more careful treatment of the assignment means that students develop a finer understanding of it and a greater ability to manage it.²

Although Richard Young and Lee Odell, two of the most notable proponents of the problem-solving rhetoric, approach the relationship between writing and problem-solving from slightly different angles, both stress the consciousness of a problem as a starting point for the writing process.³ Once aware of a problem, the individual attempts through writing either to solve it or to develop a better understanding of it. Young explains how a problem evolves in an individual's consciousness. "One's cognitive system, his Image of the world, is composed of values, beliefs, opinions, organized and unorganized information, all of which combine to form an exceedingly complex, more or less coherent system. A problem begins to take shape when one element of the image is perceived to be inconsistent with another, as, for example, when I begin to see that two theories which I have accepted are incompatible. . . ."⁴ In effect, then, one writes for psychological reasons, and the success of an essay is determined by the degree to which it can reconcile conflicting elements in the writer's cognitive structure. Although Young's description of the psychological evolution of a problem emphasizes a conflict between elements that have already been absorbed into one's Image of the world, a cognitive dissonance can be generated by a conflict between a new experience and some element of the cognitive system one brings to the experience. Or, a dissonance can be created by a tension between an anticipated experience and some aspect of the writer's cognitive structure. In any case, the writer restores a cognitive equilibrium by adjusting his or her understanding of one or both of the conflicting elements or by bringing to bear on their interaction other elements that can have a mediating effect.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to approaching writing as a problem-solving undertaking is that this approach clarifies and makes more accessible to students several pivotal issues that give writers the greatest difficulty. One of the foremost of these is the relationship between the writer and the text. The inability to understand what the writer gains through the act of composing often undermines student attempts to identify a purpose and to establish a sense of direction for their writing. Many of the most common and debilitating difficulties a reader encounters in student writing--from incoherence and disunity to stylistic awkwardness--are either caused or at least aggravated by the writer's lack of commitment to and identification with the text. However, a problem-solving rhetoric regards writing as an act of self-realization and thus prompts a writer to recognize more readily the basis for self-fulfillment in the composing process. Everything that goes into an essay ultimately participates in the writer's psychological makeup. The writer's analysis of ideas and information finally constitutes a study directed to the self because that analysis helps to restore to the writer a sense of psychological well-being. Since the problem and its resolution are so intimately bound up with the writer's sense of self, writing becomes more than an academic exercise; it is a means of maintaining psychological stability and of pursuing intellectual growth.

A problem-solving rhetoric also helps students develop a finer sense of audience. At first, the relationship between the reader and the text seems to be complicated by a problem-solving orientation because of its emphasis on the writer's sense of dissonance as a starting point. Young describes the necessarily individualistic nature of the writer's dissonace: ". . . because each of our cognitive systems is more or less unique, the problems which each of us has will also be unique. . . . The man who says he can't see what you're getting all worked up about is no doubt being quite honest. He really can't. The experience to which you respond with so much agitation simply does not clash with anything in his image. The magnitude of the inconsistency may also differ, so that what is a great problem for one is inconsequential for another . . . .⁵ If the problem out of which an essay proceeds is so much a matter of the writer's psychological makeup, what relevance can it have for a reader with a different cognitive system? In fact, the reader can have an investment in the writer's reconstruction of the writer's cognitive structure in several basic ways. Somewhat ironically, problem-solving simplifies for the writer the relationship between the reader and the text because, once the writer understands the ways in which one person interacts with another's Image, the process of engaging the reader becomes more explicitly definable.

A reader will be most readily engaged in an essay if his or her cognitive angle on the issue being addressed closely approximates that of the writer. Although the writer's and reader's respective perceptions of the universe are necessarily unique, those perceptions may be similar enough on a particular issue for the reader to find in the resolution of the writer's cognitive dilemma ideas and approaches useful for dealing with a comparable dilemma that he may be experiencing. Many essays, therefore, assume the existence of a communal dissonance and attempt either to resolve it or to articulate it more fully in order to increase the reading public's general understanding of it. Anthony Burgess begins "Is American Falling Apart?" by recognizing the dissonance America as a whole seems to be experiencing: "America is a prewar country psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong. Now everything seems to be going wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is coming apart at the seams." The clashing elements in America's collective Image, that is, the Image made up of the elements common to the majority of individual Images within a society, are the expectation of success and the recognition of failure. For the rest of the essay, Burgess attempts to adjust his own and the collective Image of contemporary America by describing how the national experience might be interpreted in a more positive light. Because Burgess's cognitive system differs from his reader's, his solution to the shared dissonance may not satisfy the reader. Nevertheless, at worst, his essay gives the reader the opportunity to think through the problem from another perspective and thus it indirectly contributes to a different solution more suited to the reader's own cognitive system.

While the cognitive structures of the writer and the reader are sometimes close enough on a given issue for both to feel the same tension automatically, more often a reader begins an essay without a sense of dissonance and develops one only after the writer has begun to describe the problem. Bertrand Russell's "The Functions of a Teacher" illustrates a writer's attempt to create a dissonance in the reader at the outset of an essay:

In attempting to generate a cognitive dissonance in the reader, Russell must rely on the reader's innate interest in the subject even if he cannot assume that the reader comes to the essay with a sense of the problem. Without a common interest in the subject, the writer's comments would be of little concern to the reader simply because the topic would play no part in the latter's cognitive structure. Given the public's general interest in education, Russell can safely expect a great many readers to become interested in his subject once he has spelled out the problem.

Often a writer does not expect to begin an essay with a shared sense of dissonance because the reader directly contributes to the difficulties being experienced by the writer. The writer's dissonance in this situation results from a clash between his own beliefs and values and those implied in the actions and attitudes of the reader. Here, the writer focuses on changing that aspect of his cognitive system that represents his perception of the reader's position on the issue being addressed. This means that he attempts to adjust the reader's cognitive structure in order to create a more harmonious psychological map for himself. The reader, for his part, finds the essay engaging because it provides a different view from his own on an issue of some concern to him, a concern reflected in the actions and attitudes that helped to create the writer's dissonance in the first place. Although the reader may be aware of his disagreement with the writer at the outset of the essay, he does not begin reading with the expectation that his cognitive system will be changed; he expects the different perspective discovered in the essay to do no more than sharpen his understanding of why he believes what he does. Of course, if the writer succeeds completely, the reader will experience a dissonance of his own and will view the world differently by the time he has finished reading the essay.

In "Was Paul Revere A Minute Person?" Jacques Barzun anticipates a reader with a psychological map different from his own in a particular respect, and he identifies the specific aspect of the reader's Image that he expects to change:

To a degree, Barzun employs a Rogerian strategy that aligns the writer's and reader's cognitive systems in order to emphasize the extent to which they agree. This creates the possibility of eventual agreement because, as the reader sees that his cognitive perspective coincides with the writer's on an important issue related to the point of disagreement, he becomes more prepared psychologically to listen to what the writer has to say and, if appropriate, to change that aspect of his Image that the writer perceives to be in error. At the same time, Barzun wastes no time in isolating the specific element of the reader's image that, from his viewpoint, should be generating a dissonance in the reader. He wants to make the reader aware of the gap that exists between on the one hand what the reader intends by endorsing certain linguistic changes and on the other what the actual effects of those changes would be. Barzun's diction ("wrenched" and "misunderstood") implants an initial sense of tension in the reader's mind. Then, through his etymological analyses and his examples of the awkwardness into which the proposed changes would lead, Barzun extends and intensifies that tension. To the extent that the reader finds Barzun's analyses and examples unassailable, he can only resolve the tension by modifying his cognitive map to accommodate the analyses and examples encountered in the essay.

In addition to an inability to grasp fully the relationship between the writer and the text and between the reader and the text, many writers fail to understand what might be termed the informing dynamic of expository prose. That is, they have difficulty perceiving how an essay "works" or what principles govern its movement and overall shape. Many writing teachers attempt to deal with student confusion on these issues by arbitrarily recommending a handful of structures into which all of a student's ideas are more or less supposed to fit. Students quickly conclude that writing is a relatively mechanical process involving the imposition of prefabricated forms on their half-formed ideas. Sometimes, the forms that teachers recommend actually reflect the cognitive activities a writer engages in when developing material for an essay, but even then the connection between thought and form is often too imprecise to be instructive. When form is divorced from the mental activities that lead to the ideas to be discussed, the writing process loses its organic character and becomes artificial, disjointed, and forced. However, in its emphasis on change as the informing dynamic expository writing, a problem-solving rhetoric teaches students to evolve for each essay they write a plan of development reflecting the thought processes behind the perceptions to be articulated in their writing. In other words, problem-solving teaches students to deal with structure as a function of perception.

Lee Odell, who bases his problem-solving curriculum on Piaget's psychology of learning, explains how the changes in self and/or environment are negotiated through writing. A writer first attempts to resolve a cognitive dissonance by "assimilating" his environment; that is, he tries to bring the circumstances of life into an order consistent with his sense of how things should be: "we try to alter our surroundings (people as well as objects) to suit our own needs and purposes; we select and shape experiences in accordance with the structures—ie., the hopes, fears, memories, conceptual categories—that comprise our 'internal world'."⁶ Inevitably, we get into situations that do not allow assimilation, situations in which outward circumstances go beyond the possibilities of our existing cognitive systems or reveal their inherent inconsistencies. In such situations, we must tailor our cognitive systems to "accommodate" the "uniqueness and complexity of experience."⁷ Most often intellectual growth takes place and problems are solved through some combination of assimilation and accommodation. Since these two processes together describe the dynamic of the ideas expressed in expository prose, we should expect the structure of prose to derive from the activities involved in negotiating the changes that enable the writer, and often the reader, to recover a cognitive equilibrium.

Using a particular kind of problem and a problem-solving paradigm specifically suited to it, Richard Larson has demonstrated how, for the kind of problem he has in mind, the cognitive processes leading to a solution can be coextensive with the structure of an essay representing the movement from problem to solution. His paradigm applies to problems whose solutions must take the form of some action or the performance of a particular task (e.g., problems of policy). The action taken represents the writer's attempt to assimilate the world around him, i.e., to adjust the "outward world" to fit his cognitive system. Larson's problem-solving model consists of eight stages: (1) defining a problem, (2) determining why the problem is a problem, (3) enumerating the goals to be served by the action taken, (4) determining priorities for the enumerated goals, (5) inventing procedures for attaining stated goals, (6) predicting results for each of the possible actions, (7) weighing predictions, and (8) finally evaluating the effects of the chosen action.⁸ After outlining and briefly explaining the stages of his problem-solving process, Larson treats his paradigm as "at once an activity of mind and a principle of form capable of organizing expository or argumentative writing."⁹ When a writer shapes his prose to reflect the mental operations behind it, his essay becomes a natural extension of the ideas it expresses. Moreover, he not only increases the possibility that the reader who has followed the writer's thinking step-by-step will be more inclined to accept those conclusions but, as Larson notes, he also builds an ethical appeal into his essay insofar as his "systematic inquiry" suggests an impressive control over his subject matter.

Though mechanical-seeming, Larson's paradigm is intended to be used creatively; it provides a general frame designed to stimulate and help direct a writer's thinking when he is faced with a problem requiring action. Because this paradigm is not intended to be universally applicable, students will be less inclined to impose it arbitrarily on problems for which it is unsuited. As students become more conscious of the need for a working interaction between idea and form, they will develop a genuine understanding of and ability to control the structural aspects of writing expository prose that too many pedagogical approaches now preclude.

Two of the basic advantages that the autobiographical essay has for a problem-solving curriculum, and indeed for any writing curriculum, derive from its focus on the self. For one, when allowed to write about themselves, students learn more quickly to identify a subject worth writing about, ie., a problematic situation. One difficulty experienced by most learning writers is their inability to recognize a problematic situation when they see one; they do not experience dissonance as readily as they should when faced with a situation that in some way violates their cognitive systems. Because autobiography focuses on the writer's life, it minimizes this difficulty, for individuals are naturally more sensitive to problems that immediately confront them and threaten to upset the stability of their lives. By beginning a writing course with an essay type that emphasizes material whose problematic nature is readily apparent, the instructor lays the groundwork for the student to recognize a threat to his cognitive harmony in situations that affect him less immediately. Focusing on the self in an initial assignment also enables the instructor to address the difficulty many learning writers have with idea development. Too often, student writing is forced and repetitive because the writer cannot seem to "find" the information that will help him to advance and round out his ideas naturally. His development of ideas is often no more than reiteration as he uses different words to make each rendition of an idea seem to amount to a new idea. In an autobiographical essay, the writer knows intimately and has conveniently available the experiences and information with which to develop his ideas. Moreover, because the essay is written in the context of a problem-solving paradigm, the student learns to rely on the cognitive movement from problem to solution as a primary source of structure for all writing.

Recent theories of autobiography, especially those articulated by James Olney, Georges Gusdorf, Jean Starobinsky, and John Pilling, create a context for viewing this essay form in terms that make it even more precisely suited to inaugurating a problem-solving curriculum."¹⁰ These theories have defined the form, in part, according to its preoccupation with such issues as the writer's individual growth through the essay, the relevance for a reader of a writer's self-exploration, and change as the shaping dynamic of a text in which the writer pursues self- development. Besides their tying in most explicitly with the definitive concerns of the problem-solving rhetoric, these issues are at the core of the composing process in general. The sooner students develop a command of them, the more readily they will employ the habits of thought and strategies of prose that college writing courses generally attempt to impart and that distinguish good writing from bad.

Although autobiographical writing done in college writing courses will necessarily differ from the book-long life works on which so much critical theory is based, many of the key principles articulated by theorists of the genre apply equally to both contexts. The difference between a student's autobiographical essay and the life study of a Montaigne or a Pascal is more a matter of degree than of kind. Certainly, the aged and experienced philosopher casting an artist's eye over an entire lifetime will render a self-interpretation more complete, complex, and insightful than that of a college student who examines with a more prosaic eye a few selected and very often recent events in his or her life in order to enhance his immediate self-knowledge. However, the same existential angst underlies the efforts of both, and thus both write in response to essentially the same cognitive dissonance.¹¹ Each writer is driven to unravel, to the degree that he or she can, the mystery of his or her own identity.

Self-understanding is necessarily problematic not only because the self is inherently complex but also because it grows and evolves with the passage of time, as James Olney notes: "That one should be transformed and different with passing time, yet be continuing and the same, is a phenomenon of obvious and singular importance for the autobiographer and the poet of personal experience. Time carries us away not only from others but from ourselves as well, and we are all continuously dying to our own passing selves."¹² With regard to his self- image, then, the writer's cognitive structure is never completely stable, and with the accumulation of experiences from day to day, he must regularly accommodate his existing sense of self to the changing circumstances of life that feed into it. The dynamic nature of the self explains why the young and the old can have at least the problem of self-identity in common. As long as one is alive, the self is in the process of becoming and therefore must remain a partial mystery that the individual feels compelled to solve, however fragmented his solution must be.

An instructor teaching the autobiographical essay must first of all help students learn to recognize and deal with the problematic nature of self-understanding. Students can be expected to go into this assignment with a preconceived sense of self that they are reluctant to give up; in effect, they approach the problem with a predetermined solution, a situation that yields forced and pointless prose. If they can learn to appreciate the impermanence of any self-concept and to investigate their own with open minds, they will be prepared to adjust it to what is discovered during the process of self-exploration. At the same time, they should not be expected to arrive through the essay at some final image that can be made a lasting part of their cognitive systems: "In the dialogue with himself, the writer does not seek to say a final word that would complete his life; he strives only to embrace more closely the always secret but never refused sense of his own destiny."¹³ In order to help students understand the problematic nature of the self and to devise strategies through which to investigate their own self-images, instructors should develop heuristic procedures for invention that are specifically suited to the autobiographical essay. Thus, students might be asked to recall past actions they consider to be uncharacteristic of them. How can they reconcile who they think they are with actions that they would not expect of themselves? Or, they might be asked to consider carefully the images they think others have of them, especially images that disagree or are inconsistent with their own in important respects. Why do these inconsistencies exist, ie., what aspects of their experiences produced the divergent images? To what degree are both images true or false? The specific questions posed by the instructor simply aim to trigger the student's reconsideration of his self-concept and the experiences that have a bearing on it. Once the process has been put in motion, the student's natural self-interest and familiarity with the subject should be enough to motivate him to pursue a truer self-concept.

Just as problem-solving focuses on the writer's intellectual and psychological growth to a degree that would seem to exclude the reader, so the autobiographical essay's definitive concern with the writer's self-exploration would seem to make it irrelevant for anyone other than the writer. James Olney asks of autobiography roughly the same question applied earlier to the problem-solving approach to writing- "If all selves are unique and, in their uniqueness, only subjectively experienced . . . and if all selves are constantly evolving, transforming, and becoming different from themselves, then how is it at all possible to comprehend or define the self or to give anyone else a sense of it?”¹⁴ In fact, a reader can benefit from an autobiography in two basic ways, and most profit from it through some combination of the two. First, a reader often consciously decides to pick up an autobiography because of an innate interest in the life of the writer. In psychological terms, he perceives a gap or senses an incompleteness in his cognitive system with regard to his knowledge of the writer. The autobiography promises to fill the gap or make more complete the reader's knowledge of the writer. In effect, the writer and the reader approach the essay with the same problem. each feels a need to know more about the subject of the autobiography. However, the material in the essay constitutes a solution for the writer and for the reader in distinct but parallel ways. As Janet Emig has effectively argued, writing is a unique and especially effective way of learning, and when the subject of the text is the writer himself, the knowledge acquired by the writer through the act of writing is a knowledge of the self.¹⁵ In effect, the autobiographical essay gives the writer an opportunity to examine old information in a new way and to establish, in Emig's terms, new "systematic connections and relationships" implicit in the old information.¹⁶ For the reader, the information represented in an autobiography is new information that fills out and refines his understanding of the writer and his life. Thus, although they use the information included in the autobiographical essay differently, both the writer and the reader learn more about the writer than they knew, and their respective dissonances dissolve as a result.

The second way in which the reader benefits from an autobiography is perhaps accomplished less consciously and depends more on the art of the writer than the first. In answering the question quoted above, Olney explains how the reader can be served in this second way. He states that the autobiographer tries "to discover or create some similitude for the experience that can reflect or evoke [the self] and that may appeal to another's experience of the self. To make the attempt is an act of faith. . . . [He explores] the inner reaches of self, especially self as it becomes or feels transcendent, and more than individual, and seeks images that might make the experience available to the reader." And John Pilling finds the autobiographies he studies consistently taking a form that reflects the authors' efforts to link the individual with the universal. "It is no accident that we find Henry Adams explicitly concerned with those who will follow after him; W. B. Yeats concluding his first sustained attempt at prose autobiography with a reference to 'all life weighed in the scales of my own life'; . . . Adrian Stokes turning his personality 'inside out' in order 'to find the themes of human nature' and 'a certain relation to the external world'; . . . "¹⁷ Thus, the reader discovers in the writer's efforts to get closer to his true self ideas and images useful for his own self-exploration. In this situation, the reader and writer appear as participants in the vast human drama on which their lives are individual variations; therefore, to the degree that the writer can at once universalize his experience and focus on its uniqueness enough to serve his own cognitive needs, his autobiography provides material through which both writer and reader are able to pursue a greater self- understanding. It is possible that a person may begin to read an autobiography unaware of his self-concept as a problem, but even such a reader will be naturally primed to suddenly recognize it as the problem it is. The incompleteness of a person's self-concept creates an ongoing problem that he carries with him, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, throughout his life. If one reads an autobiography more than superficially and if the writer is able to make his experiences and ideas simultaneously universal and individual, the reader cannot help but begin to feel a dissonance with regard to his own self-concept. The writer's self-study, then, both brings to the fore a problem for the reader and furnishes details useful in his pursuit of a solution to it.

When teaching autobiographical essay and implementing a problem-solving curriculum, writing instructors should take special care to ensure that students are able to shape their prose to suit the needs of a reader. As Linda Flower has demonstrated, producing writer-based prose is a highly functional stage of the composing process, but if students are not taught to transform self-directed prose into reader-directed prose, their writing will exhibit an associational structure, "privately loaded terms and shifting but unexpressed contexts for [their] statements."¹⁸ Because autobiographical writing and a problem-solving rhetoric emphasize the cognitive dilemma of the writer as the starting point for the essay, the danger that students will fail to transform their writer- to reader-based prose is increased. That is, with an emphasis on writing as a means of self-development, students can too easily ignore the need to make that self-development relevant for a reader, which includes expressing it in prose that makes the essay's material readily accessible to the reader. Teachers can help students learn to accommodate writer-based prose to the needs of the reader by encouraging them to analyze the experiences they examine rather than to simply reconstruct them. Analysis has a universalizing effect. It takes the experience beyond the writer to the reader because, by attaching meaning to experience, the writer establishes a conceptual bridge between his existence and that of his reader. While the reader probably has not had experiences identical to those being described, the meaning they reflect pervades a complex matrix of activities and incidents some of which may comprise a part of the reader's life. It is thus more through analysis than through the specific experience that the reader can identify with the writer and grow psychologically and intellectually through the latter's self-study.

Like a problem-solving rhetoric in general, the autobiographical essay highlights change as its main principle of movement. In his study of the stylistics of autobiography, Jean Starobinsky characterizes the underlying dynamic of personal writing: "It is the internal transformation of the individual--and the exemplary character of that transformation--that furnishes a subject for narrative discourse in which 'I' is both subject and object."¹⁹ The autobiographer manages this transformation through the combined processes of assimilation and accommodation. He is first concerned with extending his identity through an assimilation of as many aspects of his environment as possible. He studies and analyzes the world around him, especially the world encountered in his daily experiences, in order to absorb and make a part of his conscious sense of being more of that world. At the same time, he often finds that what he studies and analyzes is more complex and novel than his prevailing sense of self can oblige. He must then alter his self-concept to accommodate the complexity and variety of the experiences he studies. Through accommodation, he more than simply expands the area of experience embraced by his identity; in effect, his identity is overhauled and the writer walks away from the essay with a significantly different perception of himself.

Just telling students that writing is essentially a transformative task is often not enough to help them achieve a transformation through writing and develop a sense of direction in their essays. From the very earliest stages of pre-writing, they must perceive and treat the composing process as an activity through which the writer moves from problem to solution or from a lesser to a greater understanding of the problem. The pre-writing heuristics that students employ must not only stress the need for problematic subject matter but they must also suggest directions that might be taken in the students' negotiation of changes that will restore their cognitive equilibrium. As has been shown, for problems requiring action of some kind, Larson's heuristic works well as it both directs students in the cognitive operations necessary to develop a solution to such a problem and provides them with a structural basis for an essay representing the movement from this type of problem to an action that constitutes a solution. Although no heuristic with the detail of Larson's has been devised specifically for dealing with one's self-image as a problem, teachers might adapt Dewey's generalized problem-solving heuristic to assist students in their attempts to exercise the cognitive skills involved in developing a finer sense of self.²⁰ Fitted to an autobiographer's purposes, Dewey's paradigm might include the following stages: 1) a genuine sense of the incompleteness of one's self-concept, 2) a designation, however vague, of the ends to be served by a revised self-concept, 3) the discovery of the specific aspects of the existing self-image that are particularly troublesome, 4) the transformation of what is discovered into hypotheses leading to a finer sense of self, 5) the testing of those hypotheses, and 6) the expression of the revised self-concept that resolves, though only temporarily, the writer's initial dissonance. Like Larson's, this paradigm must be applied creatively, for it is designed to stimulate and generally direct the problem-solving process and not to restrict it. The individual character of the writer, the specific weaknesses of his existing self-concept, and the idiosyncrasies of his cognitive operations are variables that cannot be accounted for by a generalized paradigm. Students should be encouraged to depart from the model as their instincts direct them; indeed, one of its main purposes is to activate the student's cognitive intuitions. However the paradigm is used, students should look to the processes through which they discover what to say for structural bases for their essays.

The crux of any problem-solving heuristic is the part that focuses on the invention or generation of material that will provide the solution to the stated problem. In the heuristic above, stages three and four are crucial: "the discovery of the specific aspects of the existing self-image that are particularly troublesome" and "the transformation of what is discovered into hypotheses leading to a finer sense of self." Teachers can assist students' attempts to manage these activities by providing questions or other strategies of invention that will enable students to establish a fund of ideas and information from which to draw during the writing process. The several questions listed earlier to help students recognize the problematic nature of the self can also be used to direct them in their efforts to determine the specific areas in which their self-images need to be revised and to formulate new concepts of self truer than the old. Because each student is unique, the questions that lead to greater self- understanding must become increasingly individualized as the process of investigating the self progresses.

At the outset of his essay on problem-solving and composition, Lee Odell articulates a compelling rationale for implementing a problem-solving rhetoric:

If, in our writing courses, we can accomplish the objectives outlined by Odell, we will finally begin to make a substantial difference in the writing behavior of our students. They will leave our classes having developed writing processes that extend naturally from the cognitive operations that they exercise with some skill on a daily basis, and they will begin to see writing as a much more functional part of their lives. Perhaps the most crucial step in helping them to achieve this level of sophistication is developing assignments that specifically cultivate the perspectives and skills that Odell refers to. in examining the special reciprocal relationship that exists between the problem-solving rhetoric and the autobiographical essay, the foregoing discussion provides teachers with only a beginning for developing a sequence of effective assignments in a problem-solving curriculum. However, because the autobiographical essay so clearly introduces students into the skills of writing as problem-solving, this is a beginning that creates an especially sound basis from which students can learn more readily through subsequent assignments.