Problems into PROBLEMS:
A Rhetoric of Motivation
Joseph M. Williams
Department of English
The University of Chicago
1995
Introduction
Problems Rhetorical
and Substantive
For well more than a decade
now, researchers have been reporting how in the act of drafting we recognize
and solve rhetorical problems -- how we evaluate and synthesize sources, set
local rhetorical goals, then seek to achieve them. (See all of Flower, Flower et al; Carey and Flower; Kantz,
Bryson et al.) But if the
literature on solving such problems is thick, our understanding of how we
articulate the substantive problem that occasions our efforts to solve them is
quite thin. By substantive
problem I do not mean the local and ongoing struggle toward the discovery and
articulation of meaning, but the significant question whose answer justifies
the effort, the problem in the world or mind whose solution repays our time
spent writing and our readers spent reading. We criticize the writing of our students and colleagues on
many grounds, but none is more common -- or devastating -- than the observation
that they have failed not just to solve a problem, but even to pose one that we think interesting. And as teachers, we experience no
failure more common than our inability to explain what we mean by pose or
interesting or problem and what it is about a text that elicits such
criticism (but for interesting see Davis, and Kaufer and Geisler, and for
problem, Carter).
Our sense of a good problem is most
acute when we dont see one anywhere in a paper, but most immediately when we
dont see one in its introduction.
These two paragraphs introduced papers written in a first-year
humanities course, responding to the question What can we learn about Athenian
values by comparing the appeals that the Corcyreans and Corinthians made to
Athens early in Thucydides History?
1. In
433, Corcyra and Corinth disputed which should rule Epidamnus. Because they could not settle the
conflict, they each sent representatives to Athens to appeal for its help. Corcyra emphasized how they could help
Athens in the coming war while the Corinthians appealed to history and the just
thing to do. Since Athens was the
birthplace of Socrates and Aristotle, it would be easy to think they would side
with justice, but after debating among themselves, the Athenians decided to
support Corcyra. Its important to
understand the values that Athens rejected before the war, because we could be
misled when they explain some of their cruel actions during the war. The speeches describe the values of
justice, honor, and tradition, which the Athenians reject, and the values of
pragmatism and self-interest, which they probably really believed in.
2. When
Corcyra and Corinth disagreed over control of Epidamnus, they went to Athens to
ask for help. The Corinthians
appealed to Athens sense of justice, while the Corcyreans appealed to their
self-interest. When we think of
justice we think of Socrates and Aristotle, so it would be easy to think that
the Athenians would side with Corinth.
But they sided with Corcyra.
We have to understand the values that Athens rejects and accepts,
because we could be misled about their real motives when they appeal to justice
to defend some of their actions later in the war. Athens rejected the Corinthian values of justice, honor, and
treaties, and accepted the Corcyrean values of future self-interest.
We might tell the writer of the first
that when he found his substantive problem he solved a rhetorical one, the
other that she has a rhetorical problem because she has not yet found a
substantive one. But we ought not
be surprised if the nuances of that usage escape them (indeed, it is a
distinction not clearly, much less consistently made in much of the published
literature on rhetorical problem solving). So as not to confound rhetorical
problems with substantive ones, I will refer to a difficulty in general and to
the local on-line struggles to create text in particular as small-p problems;
to the substantive problems that occasion the struggle as problems, specifically as we articulate
them in introductions as
justification for claiming our readers time. My substantive problem in this paper has to do with
problems and their articulation as problems,
particularly in introductions; among my local rhetorical problems as I
wrote this paragraph was constructing an introduction that distinguished
problems from problems clearly.
Work on Introductions and
Problems
The slight practical
knowledge we have about introductions comes from the standard handbooks, most
of which trivialize the slim legacy of classical advice about forensic exordia into banalities like State what you are
going to talk about and Catch the readers interest with an anecdote or
fact, as if in the real world we choose what to read on the basis of whether
our interest is piqued in the first sentence or two. That may be true as we
browse through a popular magazine, but who reading these words has stopped
reading a student paper because it opened in a boring way? In our professional
worlds, most of what we read we read because we must, regardless of its opening
charms. And as for formulating problems, I know of only two texts that
usefully address the matter at
all, but both talk around their cognitive structure and neither explains how to
articulate them persuasively (Flower, 1989; Young, Becker, and Pike). Two do
address the structure of introductions, but both aim at technical writers and
do not consider how the rhetorical articulation of a problem maps onto
its cognitive structure (Mathis
and Stephenson, Anderson). The
rest that I have seen are not just useless, but often counterproductive.
Theoretical studies have gone only a bit
further. Rhetoricians have debated
at length the ontology of what I think they would call the problematic of a
situation in the form of what Bitzer (1968, 1980) has called the exigence of
the situation that demands a rhetorical response. But they have left what counts as exigent substantially
undefined, as if it were a primitive in the system (see also Patton,
Scott). In composition studies,
the problem of articulating problems
in introductions has been pursued hardly at all. Hashimoto has unpacked the
banality of most textbook advice.
Another study contrasts how problems are defined in information sciences
and in the philosophy of science, but does not distinguish a problem from a problem or address the
articulation of either (Carter).1
Two other studies, both quite important,
I think, have examined the ways that introductions to journal articles socially
construct problems in different
fields (Bazerman, MacDonald), but neither decomposes the general concept of
problem in a way that lets us understand how its cognitive structure informs
its rhetorical articulation. The
notion of problem lurks behind the
inquiry into novelty by Kaufer and Geisler, but they do not attempt to map what
counts as novel into its articulation (though as I will suggest later, there
are analogues in their discussion of novelty and the components of a problem). In a series of useful studies, John Swales and his
colleagues have mapped introductions in scientific, technical, and, more
recently, in academic texts (Swales, 1984, 1985, 1990, 1992; Dudley-Evans,
Crooks, Harris; for a more general discussion of problems see also Hoey and
Jordan, 1984, 1988).
While Jordan, Hoey, and especially Swales
broke important ground in this area, articulating problems is, I think, a problem richer than even these
careful and detailed accounts suggest.
And I know of only one study that examines how the introduction to a
student paper influenced judgments about its author (Berkenkotter, Huckin, and
Ackerman). But their methodology
derives from Swales, does not address the underlying concept of problem, and is, I think, in one crucial
regard, mistaken.2
The Consequences of our
Ignorance
This gap in our understanding
has exacted a cost on the performance of our students.
First, posing and solving problems is what most of us do, but most
of our students, both undergraduate and graduate, seem unaware of not just how
to pose a problem, but that their
first task is to find one. As a
consequence, they often seem just to write about some topic, and when they
do, we judge them to be not thinking "critically, to be writing in ways
that are at best immature (Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman), at worst
incompetent. Yet many of our
students who do not seem to engage with academic problem-solving, in fact, do. Their problem is that they are ignorant of the conventional
ways by which they should reveal that engagement; ours is that we have no
systematic way of demonstrating to them the rhetoric of doing so.3
Second, students who do not understand
how to articulate a problem lack a
heuristic that would help them not just articulate one, but even know how to go about looking for one that their
readers might judge interesting even once they articulated it. We have no systematic way to show them
how to do that either.
Third, the introduction to any text
profoundly influences how we interpret and evaluate the rest of it (Kieras
1978, 1980; Meyer 1977, 1985), but we do not understand how a writers initial
formulation of a problem
influences how we evaluate its solution.
If we do not understand how an introduction shapes a readers response
to what follows it, we cannot create a pedagogy that shows students how to
anticipate those responses.
And there are costs to our
theorizing: The formal analyses by
Swales and others rest on an empiricist methodology based on counting and
categorizing, so we do not know whether introductions have a text structure
explicable by an account of discourse more robust than one based on
accumulating examples and generalizing from them. We have no way to understand
the structure of introductions in the context of other or larger structures.
My object is thus both
conceptual and pedagogical: I will
describe how we articulate problems
in prototypical introductions, in order to offer a heuristic not only for
articulating a problem
persuasively, but for finding or inventing one in the first place.4
This pedagogical objective rests on a structural account of problems and
problems that both reflects and
reinforces a view of discourse structure more complex than that ordinarily used
in composition studies, but not so fine-grained as to be useless for practical
application. In Part I, I will
describe how the cognitive structure of a problem informs the rhetorical
structure of its articulation in introductions. In Part II, I will
describe (i) how introductions influence judgments of whole texts, (ii)
how some students have responded to a pedagogy that teaches an explicit
rhetoric of problem formulation,
and (iii) what it is about one kind of problem
that makes it so difficult for them (and us) to engage with it. In Part III, I will discuss some
practical issues in teaching problems
and suggest further research.
I - The Structure of Problems and Problems
1 Cognitive Structure
Four
Definitions of Problem
It is difficult for our
students to grasp what we mean by problem, much less an interesting one,
partly because we and they use the word in contradictory ways. First, in the ordinary language of our
ordinary thinking, we associate problem with something unpleasant and difficult: indigestion, a dead battery, AIDS,
Bosnia. But in our academic
discourse, we use problem in at least three other ways.
In
its most trivialized form, a problem is something like If four people can
paint three walls of a room in two hours, how long would it take . . . , an
exercise that ideally measures, diagnoses, and teaches, but is more often a
routine task with an algorithmic solution, something close to a five-paragraph
essay.
Among
cognitive scientists, a problem is typically conceived of as a task, because
their principal interest is in how rats and people solve problems, not in how
they find or experience them, an objective that I think explains why they
standardly resort to the metaphor of a space to be traversed, as a gap which
separates where you are from where you want to be (Hayes). While this definition implicitly makes
present point A less desirable than hoped-for point B, cognitivists do not
build into their definition of problem the same negative feeling associated
with problem in our ordinary language; beyond the mental effort entailed in
solving one, for them a problem is devoid of affect. It simply defines the space through which someone or
something tries to get from here to there, either literally as through a maze
or figuratively through the calculations necessary to get to the cube root of
5.
In
the philosophy of science, problems are also spatially metaphorized, but often
not just as a space
between here and our goal, but as what is in that space. A problem is constituted by obstacles or difficulties in
the way of reaching goals (Nickles) ; a hurdle that we must surmount in order
to achieve a goal (Hattiagandi).
More to our purpose, philosophers of science are interested in the
problems that motivate our intellectual lives. Thus they are interested in problems not as any task, much
less as unpleasant situations in our daily lives, but as significant
intellectual projects defined by social and historical constraints and whose
successful solution will be assessed by a community of discourse -- the
problems of evolution, quantum mechanics, mind vs. body. Such problems are variously
characterized as Explanatory Ideals [minus] Current Capacity (Toulmin); as a
demand that a certain goal be achieved plus constraints on the manner in which
the goal is achieved, i.e., [community defined] conditions of adequacy on the
problem solution (Nickles); as research projects . . . constituted by
constraints set by background theories (Sintonen) -- the problems we think of
not as troublesome but as the raison dՐtre for the life of the mind.
But for our purposes, all of these
definitions are flawed. Our
ordinary language definition makes problem a holistic, internally unstructured
condition or event: My problem is
_______.[fill in the blank with a single noun -- alcoholism, poverty,
depression] It does not suggest
how to decompose a problematical situation into elements that we can articulate
as a problem. Worse, it implies that problems always
have negative associations: When
we ask a friend staring glumly into his beer what the problem is, we do not
expect as a lugubrious response, If two trains 40 miles apart leave their
stations at the same time . . . or Fertility images in Yucatan between 300
and 600 AD.
Unlike cognitivists, philosophers of
science address only problems that we consider interesting, but along with
cognitivists, they decompose "problem" into components -- Place A,
Place B, the distance between them, the obstacles therein, and so on. But that cognitivist or philosophical
spatial figure structurally contradicts ordinary usage: In ordinary usage, we identify a
problem not as the space
between A and B nor even as the obstacles
therein, but as state A itself. In ordinary usage, the problem of
AIDS" is AIDS,
not the gap between having and not having it. Having AIDS is one problem; discovering its cure is another;
and then actually traversing that gap and overcoming the obstacles -- i.e., getting rid of AIDS -- is a
different one
yet. (And problems such as Two
trains leave their stations . . . are wholly irrelevant to our concern,
because they epitomize what it is about some problems that is least interesting
-- they have already been solved.)
So not only can we find no common
denominator among these definitions; the senses of problem that we associate
with algorithmic, bad, and interesting contradict one another, and none
of them decompose a problem into
its elements in a way that suggests how might we articulate them. So it is not surprising that students
associate their ordinary language sense of problems as nasty or routine with
our academically privileged definition of problem as interesting, and that as a
consequence they are not infrequently baffled by what we mean when we say that
they have a problem because they do not have one.
A Definition of
Problem: Two Necessary Elements
We need a definition of
"problem" that helps us decompose what we feel is a problematical
situation into parts in a way that lets us articulate those parts in the
statement of it as a problem, particularly
in introductions. Such a
definition should subsume both bad and interesting problems, and it should
provide a heuristic that not only helps us look for a problem in mere accumulated knowledge, but lets us find one,
construct it, and then evaluate its potential interest to a community of
readers.
I begin with two situations not
rhetorical and so not yet, in my terms, problems:
1. On my way to get married, I get a flat
-- no spare, empty road. If I am
late, my intended leaves me. She
is rich and generous; I am in debt.
Do I have a problem?
2. At the empty church, listening to the
radio, I hear my lottery number announced -- I have won a million dollars. I have only to appear on TV to pick up
the check. Do I have a solution to
at least one of my problems?
The default answers to both
questions would seem to be yes, but could be no: If I didnt want to get married under any circumstances but
was willing to only because I promised, my flat tire is no problem; indeed, it
is a solution. And if I am hiding
from the mob because they want five million minimum or my legs, then getting
the one million is no solution, but a new problem. I transformed a problem into a solution and a solution into
a problem by changing the relationship between two components that are both
necessary for the existence of either a problem or a problem (but not sufficient for the latter, a third component being still
necessary for that):
Problem-component
1: There must be a de-stabilizing
condition. This condition can be
literally any state of affairs
-- from a flat tire to winning the lottery -- so long as it entails an effect
of the kind next described as Problem-component 2.
Problem-component
2: That de-stabilizing condition
(hereafter just Condition) must entail consequences that are undesirable to
the person who claims the problem.
Call these undesirable consequences of the Condition its Costs. My flat tire is a Condition whose
entailed Cost is that I lose my intended (if I really want to get married); my
winning and picking up a million is a Condition whose entailed Cost is that the mob takes it and also
breaks my legs.
By this definition, just having some painless but deadly disease
that will kill me tomorrow is not alone a problem; it is not necessarily even a
Condition in a problem. My deadly
disease is the Condition of a potential problem if and only if that Condition entails for me a Cost
that I want to avoid. I might not
want to die tomorrow, but I am unlikely to worry about it now if I am scheduled
to hang this afternoon.
Tangible problems of the world such as
flat tires, broken legs, and deadly diseases are, as we shall see, structurally
identical to what we call conceptual problems, but are, in a few crucial ways,
different. As suggested, the Condition of a tangible problem can be literally
any state of affairs (in Paradise Lost, the existence of God was a problem for Satan) and the Cost
of a tangible problem is almost always defined by a consequence that makes the
person who has the problem unhappy. On the other hand, the Condition and Cost
of conceptual problems are quite different. The Condition part of a conceptual problem is always defined
by a relatively small group of words that refer to a cognitive state we name
ignorance, misunderstanding, error, paradox, discrepancy, puzzle conflict,
dispute, disagreement, and so on, words that imply some gap in knowledge or
flaw in understanding. We imply the Condition to a conceptual problem in a
question that implicitly defines the range of our ignorance or
misunderstanding: how many stars
are in the sky? why do cats rub their jaws against things? did Latin epics
influence the creation of Beowulf?
But that gap in knowledge or flawed
understanding is part of a conceptual problem if and only if not finding the answer to the question
entails a Cost I do not want to bear. That Cost, however, is also defined by a
gap in knowledge or flawed understanding at a higher level of significance
for the person asking the question.
How many stars are in the sky? I dont know, but I thereby have no
problem, because to be candid, I dont care that I dont know. I wouldnt mind knowing, but my
ignorance of their number is no Condition to any conceptual problem that I can articulate, because I
can think of no Cost that I bear
if I go to my grave not knowing.5 But for
an astronomer, not knowing the number of stars in the sky is the Condition to a
profound conceptual problem because
the Cost of not knowing that number means that astronomers do not know
something much more important: how much matter is in the universe? and
not knowing how much matter is in the universe means that they dont know
something more important yet -- will the universe continue to expand into
eventual oblivion or collapse back into itself and start over? In other words, what is not a problem
for me might be a big one for someone else, who might be able to persuade me
that I should have a problem with the number of stars
in the sky.6
A rough heuristic to identify Conditions
and Costs is to insert the question So what? between the sentences that we
think state a Condition and the sentences that we think state its Cost. If a So what? is plausibly elicited
by the prior sentences and plausibly answered by the following ones, if we do
not feel compelled to ask once again, So what? but rather Oh, I see, we
have identified Conditions and Costs at least to our own satisfaction.
The hole in
the ozone is widening. So what?
I might get cancer. Oh,
I see.
I have a flat tire. So what?
I wont get married. Oh, I see.
I won a million. So what?
When I pick it up, the mob will break my legs. Oh, I see.
I have a disease called exanguinary
urotoma. So what?
I will die.Oh, I see.
I dont know how many stars there are in
the sky. So what?
Until I know, I cant
calculate the
total mass of the universe. So what? What do you
mean So what?
As we shall see, the trick is
identifying Costs to the satisfaction of our audience.
We can complicate this definition: Moving from A to B, from ignorance to
knowledge, from flawed understanding to better understanding, must be
difficult, unobvious, take thought, etc (Gagne). But as John Dewey put it, whenever anything no matter how
slight and commonplace in character -- perplexes and challenges the mind so
that it makes belief at all uncertain, there is a genuine problem, or question
(13). But in our terms, the
perplexity or challenge that makes belief uncertain enough to constitute an
interesting problem must entail a Cost to leaving that perplexity or
uncertainty unresolved, and that Cost must be greater than the Condition that
exacts it. So for our purposes,
Deweys definition stipulates only half the matter -- the de-stabilizing
Condition. In addition to the
Condition of perplexity and challenge, there must be a Cost to leaving the
perplexity unresolved, to leaving the challenge unmet. But before that problem rises to the
level of a problem, that Cost must
be exacted on someone other than ourselves: it must be recognized and acknowledged as a Cost exacted on
our readers.
Transforming a Problem
into a problem
Before we can articulate a
problem rhetorically as a problem
we require this third element -- a community of readers who acknowledge and
accept that the Cost has an impact on them. If I were
obsessed with eliminating a gap in knowledge about the number of trees on the
island of Zanzibar, I might have a problem if not finding out exacted on me the
Cost of sleepless nights. But it
would be a problem with no rhetorical dimension, because so far as I know, no
one but me would pay the Cost of not knowing. But my purpose here is to describe the rhetorical structure of a substantive academic and
professional problem
that we articulate for readers as a problem
that they might find
not just interesting, but as something in which they might recognize an
interest, something in
which they have a stake.
Therefore, the third component:
Problem-component
3: There must be a community of readers
who perceive the Cost as undesirable to themselves, readers who are not just interested in
a topic, but who have -- or we believe should have -- an interest in a problem
being solved. (Crucial here is the
distinction between just being
interested in and having
an interest in. )
However much we might not want to bear the Costs of a
Condition, if our readers perceive no Cost to them, then they have no problem and we have
no problem, which constitutes a
rhetorical problem for us, if we have an interest in their sharing our
problem. This third component thus
requires either that our readers already know that they have the problem we pose (an exigence that seems
to exist in the objective situation), or that by an act that parallels their
willing suspension of disbelief when we ask them to read a fiction, they must
will themselves (i.e., we must persuade them) to suspend their skeptical
indifference to a problem that
they did not know they had, and at least for the space of time it takes to read
our introduction, be willing to imagine having it (the exigence that we
construct for them and that they must play along with).
In either case, however, a problem is always socially
constructed: if our audience
already knows about the problem, then it has been constructed for us; if not,
we have to construct a problem so
that our readers will be not just interested in our problem, but have an interest in its Cost and thus in its
solution.7
Here is the schematic structure of a
substantive problem:
As I wrote this, I was wrestling with
lower-case-problems, trying not only to articulate but to discover, define, and
refine my upper-case-problem. It is a commonplace in our field
that this act of writing helps us solve our problems, but a paradox that I will
address below is that by helping us discover our solution, writing also helps
us discover and define our problem. Unfortunately, it is difficult
for our students to recognize even the possibility that solving a rhetorical
problem might help them create a substantive problem,
much less articulate it well, for at least three reasons:
First, we must know the kinds of
problems that our community of
readers is likely to entertain as plausible. In regard to a tangibly pragmatic problem like AIDS, we can
be reasonably sure that our widest community recognizes it as a tangible,
practical problem that
could become the basis for a research problem. But
when we ask our students to write about what happened in Hamlet or ancient Greece, they have no tangible
problem that pragmatically motivates them to formulate a conceptual problem
that will motivate their research problem
about either of those topics, much less know what conceptual problems
a community of discourse will think plausible, much less interesting about
them. Not until they become
advanced students are they likely to be part of any community of discourse that
defines itself by having an interest in problems involving either Hamlet or Greece, problems that we expect them
to articulate in their papers as problems.
Second, many students do not understand in the first place that a central
object of education is not just to acquire information; as many fail to
understand that it is also more than to learn to solve problems. Only a few come to us inclined to look
for problems and then
articulate them pro-actively. And
so most of our students become, at best, reactive solvers of problems presented
to them; at worst, passive purveyors of received knowledge.
Third, even when they overcome these obstacles,
few of them understand the structure of a problem and the rhetoric of
its articulation as a problem.
There is little we can do about their
lack of knowledge of any community of discourse beyond their own narrow one;
acquiring that knowledge and joining any community takes time (though I will
suggest how we can provide them with transitional communities of discourse in
which their own problems can evolve into problems). But in any context, we can
encourage our students to understand that finding and posing problems is
important and to help them understand why writing about some kinds of problems
is so difficult. But to do that, we must first
understand how the structure of a problem informs the structure of a problem, particularly as we formulate it
in an introduction.
2 - Introductions and The Rhetorical Construction
of a PROBLEM
A First
Approximation
This two-part structure of a
problem directly informs its articulation as a problem. A minimally explicit introduction
states both a causal Condition and its consequent Cost (though as we shall see,
one or both may be implied). Since
a problem implies a solution, an
introduction must refer to it as well, either by stating its gist or by implicitly offering a promise that such a gist will be forthcoming (I hereafter
fully capitalize when I refer to some functional element of an introduction
realized in words).
A minimally explicit introduction thus
requires two elements, the statement of a problem
and a response to it, typically
its solution. The statement of the problem in turn consists of its two necessary constitutive elements, cost and condition:
[(Recently, the thinning of the ozone layer has allowed
sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered.) condition (As a result, we are going to have more cancer and higher
medical costs.) cost
] problem
[We can avoid these consequences only if
we ban chemicals that degrade ozone.gist
of solution] response
As noted, the simplest way to
locate conditions and costs is to determine between which two
sentences or groups of sentences we might plausibly insert So what?
The thinning
of the ozone layer is allowing sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered. [So what?]
We are going to have more cancer and higher medical costs. [Oh, I
see.]
No lesson is more crucial and
more difficult for any of us to learn than that readers may not accept our
first answer. When a reader again
asks So what? to the statement not of the Condition but of what we think is a Cost self-evident to anyone, that
reader, however implausibly, does not perceive how she will bear what she will count as a Cost, and so we have
still failed to articulate a problem:
The thinning
of the ozone layer allows sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered. [So what?]
We are going to have more cancer and medical costs. [So what?]
You will pay higher taxes and maybe die.
If at this point our audience had said
not Oh, I see but again So what?, we would have to acknowledge that she may
never recognize what we think is her self-interest. The number of
times we have to answer the question So what? is a metric of understanding
the implications of a problem. By charting the points at which
different readers stop asking So what? and say Oh, I see, we define the
concentric circles of wider and narrower communities of interest, which help
define communities of discourse:
nothing more clearly defines a community than its shared understanding
of what it wants to avoid.
Typical introductions elaborate these
elements in such detail and so variously (an issue we shall address in a
moment) that their structures rarely stand out in the crisp relief that this
formal analysis suggests: Typical
introductions may describe Conditions briefly and Costs in detail, or vice
versa; they make the solution
explicit or only sketch it; they may explore relationships among Costs and
Conditions, with Costs becoming Conditions
that exact yet more Costs.
This simple structure may also be obscured by two more components that I
will also discuss in a moment.
Indeed, under certain circumstances, a problem may seem not to be
expressed completely at all, but its structure may nevertheless be
reconstructed in the mind of the reader.
In short, I simply claim that despite apparently great surface
differences, the rhetorical articulation of all conceptual problems is (or more accurately,
perhaps, should be) informed by this conceptual structure of a problem.
The first approximation of the underlying
rhetorical structure of an introduction to a problem-solving
text will thus look like the structure of a problem, but now the left-to-right
order represents prototypical sequential ordering.
Variations
We can re-arrange these
elements: The elements in the
ozone introduction might be ordered like
these (Condition is
italicized, Cost boldfaced, solution
ordinary font):
cost1 - condition2 - solution3: We are going to have more cancer and
higher medical costs
because recently, the thinning of the ozone layer has allowed sunlight to
reach the earth unfiltered. We can avoid these consequences only if
we ban chemicals that degrade ozone.
solution3- condition2 - cost1: We must ban
chemicals that degrade ozone because recently, the thinning of the ozone
layer has allowed sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered.
As a result, we are going to have more cancer and higher medical
costs.
solution3- cost1- condition2 : We must ban chemicals that degrade the
ozone because we are going to have more cancer and increased medical costs as a result of a thinning ozone layer
allowing sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered.
condition2 - solution3- cost1: Recently,
the thinning ozone layer has allowed sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered.
We must ban chemicals that degrade ozone because we are going to have
more cancer and higher medical costs.
cost1- solution3- condition2 : Because we are going to have more
cancer and higher medical costs,
we must ban chemicals that degrade ozone.
Cancer will occur because recently the thinning ozone layer has
allowed sunlight to reach the earth unfiltered.
But while in principle free, the order of
these elements is highly constrained.
The most common order is: problem - solution, and within problem,
condition - cost. First, if the point of a text is to
explicate a solution to the problem and the writer locates that
point at the beginning of the text, then
a statement of the gist of that solution will predictably be expressed
close to the end of the introduction.
The point sentence of any unit of discourse prototypically appears in
one or both of only two places: at
the end of its introductory segment or at the end of the whole (Colomb and Williams
1986, Williams and Colomb, 1991).
Furthermore, that order is supported by narrative logic: a problem
seems temporally to create the need for its solution. If
the solution conventionally
appears at the end of the introduction, then that allows only two possible
orders:
condition - cost
- solution
or cost - condition - solution
But of these two orders, only
one also reflects chronological order, because causal conditions seem narratively to entail their costs. Thus the privileged order is condition - cost - solution.
That is not to say that we never see its
alternatives. Here are the first
three sentences from a New York Times editorial (January 16, 1993, p.14):
Women
and abortion providers who need Federal legal protection from Operation
Rescues spiteful, violent blockades of abortion clinics will have to go to
Congress. The Supreme Court, by
refusing to apply existing law against domestic terrorism, has made the trip
necessary. Fortunately, there is
broad support in Congress and the incoming Clinton Administration for a
protective new law.
The first sentence states the
cost of the condition, the second the condition. The third sentence is the gist of the solution. Only if we reverse the first two sentences can we plausibly
insert So what between them (I condense):
The Supreme
Court has refused to apply the law against domestic terrorism. [So what?]
Women who need protection will now have to go to Congress.
By stating a Cost first, the
writer opened more dramatically, but at the marginal expense of requiring
readers to work backwards from effect to cause. In so doing, the writer has not violated any rule. But all things being equal, readers
process most efficiently those linguistic and rhetorical patterns that reflect
a sequence closest to a privileged prototype, in this case chronological
order.
Because this concept of privileged
prototype is central to understanding the full model of introductions that
follows, it requires some explanation.
Privileging and Prototype
Semantics
Privileging is a concept
that arises out of recent work in prototype semantics (Lakoff, Langacker,
Rosch, Rosch and Mervis, Mervis and Rosch, Taylor 1989, 1990, Tsohatzidis,
Turner, Winters) and so far is surprisingly little used in composition theory
(though see xxxxx). As opposed to the way logicians construct hierarchies of
categories based on classical theories of Aristotelian logic, prototype
semantics addresses how we actually construct mental categories and experience
them. Prototype semantics differs from classical logical theory in two
important ways, and both imply the concept of privilege.
First, for classical logicians, any
category in a hierarchy of categories is in principle logically equal to
others, regardless of its super- or subordinate level. The sub-category of cups we call
demitasses is in the category cups, and cups in the category crockery,
and crockery in tableware, etc. Those categories differ in their generality,
but not in any logically principled way; none is privileged over any
other.
In our mental lives, however, we do not
respond to all categories up and down certain hierarchies equally. In some hierarchies, one particular
category is more equal than others above it or below it. For example, imagine what we think of
when someone says cup or table or hammer on the one hand, and crockery,
furniture, and tool on the other.
The image that comes to mind when we think of cup is different in quality from the image that comes to mind when
we think of crockery. If we are
asked to think of crockery, furniture, or tool, or any category more
general than those, most of us have no sharply defined image. If we do, that image will only
accidentally agree with anyone elses:
Ask five people to draw a picture of crockery and you are likely to
get five different pictures.
But if most of us were asked to draw a
picture of a cup, we would draw an image that is visually better bounded and
predictable: a concave object of a
certain size and thickness, with curving sides wider at the top than the
bottom, with a handle for a finger.
If we are then asked to think of a specific kind of cup, table, or
hammer -- demitasse or coffee
table or claw hammer -- we may draw an object that is different from cup
or table or hammer, but the difference is not as great qualitatively as the images called up by cup on the
one hand and crockery on the other.
The specific image of demitasse is closer to the specific image of
cup, than the specific image of cup is to the amorphous image of
crockery. A category like that
named by cup or hammer or table is a basic level category. Its members are those that we image
most easily and, perhaps as a consequence, we experience most directly and with
the greatest cognitive efficiency.
The second difference between classical
logic and prototype semantics is, for our purposes, more important. In a classical category, all cups are
equal; none more equal than any other.
But in our mental lives, certain members of basic level categories are
closer to a cognitive center of that category than are others. Some objects we call cups, for example,
are unequivocally cups, even when filled with milk and cornflakes; they are so
close to the prototype of a cup that they will always be cups. Other cups, however, look very
different: two holes in the handle
for two fingers, almost but not quite large enough to be a bowl, with straight
sides angling inward from a base wider than the opening, etc. But we still call such an object a
cup and not a bowl, mug, or glass.
But it would not be a typical cup. In fact, were it large enough and filled with cornflakes and
milk, we might call it a bowl.
Prototype semantics argues not only that hierarchies of certain common concepts have a basic level category, but that for every basic level category, we have a concept of a most representative member, a concept that defines the cognitive center of that category. In this sense, just as one category in a hierarchy -- the basic level category -- is cognitively privileged over others, so some members of basic level categories are better members than others: They are cognitively first among logical equals.