All "Theory" pages such as this are introductory essays for instructors learning to apply theory to pedagogy. This essay, originally published in CCC 52.1 (2000): 96-128, is widely quoted in the composition field. It offers a summary of the past and suggestions for the future concerning methods of teaching students to write sentences. It is available at http://tc.eserver.org/14462.html.

This next essay applies an element from critical-thinking theory called "heuristics" to the organization of papers. The theory of heuristic writing described below demonstrates that organizational patterns of writing are not just static structural skeletons on which to hang papers, but rather dynamic learning tools that encourage students to explore new avenue of thought and feeling. Such tools of thought create exploratory thought.

Those who are interested in the concept of critical thinking and how it can be applied also will find this essay helpful. The page starts with a basic but thorough introductory definition of critical thinking and then uses this definition to develop one element of critical thinking in writing. (Length: 6.5 screens + an appendix table of 1 screen)

Aeschylus (2002), the ancient Greek playwright, wrote that the first humans “had eyes” that “saw to no avail” and “ears [that] did not understand” until Prometheus gave these first people fire. The fire not only helped them stay warm but also enabled them to “discern the rising of the stars” and “the combining of letters…with which to hold all things in memory” (pars. 2-3). In this latter sense, the fire was heuristic: more than a thing in itself, it acted as a tool—in this case, as an inner or symbolic abstract object that caused the nascence of learning. Likewise, we have come to recognize in recent decades that many intellectual forms exist not just as abstract objects or products but rather can act heuristically--as exploratory tools. This essay considers heuristics specifically in exploratory discourse.

Heuristics as I describe them in this essay are part of critical thinking, so I will begin by defining critical thinking. As Meyers (1986) pointed out, critical thinking is neither simply formal argument nor problem solving, nor is it merely the study of logic, though all of these elements certainly can be part of it. Like the word "process" when applied to writing, the phrase “critical thinking” means something different to each person who uses it. Some define it by Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking Skills, as follows, each element of which includes all below it:

Robert Ennis (1986) of the Illinois Critical Thinking Project added the following: "Critical thinking . . . includes most or all of the directly practical higher order thinking skills [as in Bloom's Taxonomy]"; however, "critical thinking is not equivalent to the higher order thinking skills." Rather, it is (also) "reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do." In fact, says Ennis, "critical thinking includes dispositions" (p. 10).

(3) both logical and expressive (it includes expressive, emotive, and intuitive forms, as well)

A second term is "heuristic." It means "to discover or find," and heuristics sometimes are referred to as educational tools--tools that help discovery. Therefore, heuristics are tools for finding or discovering something.

Another term used in this essay is the phrase "exploratory discourse." Exploratory discourse is, simply, discourse that explores a subject. Kinneavy (1971) identified exploratory discourse as "dialectical--probable (Aristotle and Aquinas)," "valuative (Morris)," and questioning--interrogative (Russell)" (p. 65); as an "opinion (Plato)" and a "way of invention ( Cicero )"; and as involving "discovery (Bacon . . . , Descartes)," "proposing (Pierce)," and "inquiry (Dewey)" (p. 98). Even "emotion is not entirely excluded . . . , e.g. Plato's dialogues" (p. 68). Thus we can define heuristics in use as tools for exploratory discourse as follows: using discovery to probe for something more than what we have now. I like to use a metaphor suggested to me by Joel Peterson (1992), director of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Critical Thinking Project, 1992-1998: using heuristics is like having a toolbox (Informal interview).

Rose (1990) situated this problem succinctly in Lives on the Boundary when he spoke of the story of Millie, “whose test scores placed her . . . very low just about anywhere . . .” (p. 218). Rose tried to show Millie how to handle a set of multiple-choice test questions. Each of Millie’s questions asked her to give the meaning of the underlined prefix of a word: for example, for “unhappy,” her choices are “very, glad, sad, not” (p. 217). Many students in Millie’s class, like Millie herself, had failed this set of questions (p. 218). Rose explained to Millie in every way he could how to see the underlined prefix, and still she made her choices based on the entire word. Finally, in frustration and almost as an afterthought, Rose did “something the publishers of the test tell you not to do:” he circled the underlined prefix of one of the words in the questions (p. 219). Millie immediately chose the correct answer. Then, just as he was ready to stop his session with her, Millie circled the next underlined prefix on her own (p. 220). She then answered the question correctly. She proceeded, next, to circle several more prefixes and to choose the correct answers, and on the last question, she did so without needing to make a circle physically: she now could “see” what she was supposed to. Rose concluded, “Cognitive psychologists talk about task representation, the way a particular problem is depicted or reproduced in the mind. Something shifted in Millie’s conception of her task, and it had a powerful effect on her performance.” In the terms of critical thinking, Rose gave Millie a heuristic, simple in conception yet devastating in its small area of impact. He taught Millie to think like an academic.

Jerome Bruner stated in The Process of Education, “Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (qtd. in Rose, 1990, p. 142). My mother, Helen Jewell, an elementary school teacher for a number of years and then the founder and department chair of early childhood education at Carl Sandberg Community College in Illinois, taught third-graders simple thesis-paper writing. She showed me: a simple method, really, of teaching the basic argument structure heuristically using personal experience as proofs. I was amazed, and I wondered why more students were not receiving such basic instruction in their early years, as it would save those of us teaching beginning college writing a lot of trouble. Most instruction that is effective teaches heuristics; one can argue, in fact, that the primary difference between the traditional paradigm of learning by rote memory and the contemporary one of learning to think—to analyze, compare and contrast, argue, and synthesize—is one of heuristics.

In my own thinking and teaching, I imagine myself having a wide variety of heuristics—of tools in my intellectual toolbox. Some tools let me take apart the machinery of systems to see what makes things tick. Some tools are gardeners' tools with which I can go rooting about in the fertile dirt of ideas new and old, digging, planting, and looking at roots and rocks. Some tools are simple and some marvelously complex, and in any given task I am free to pull out several tools and see which ones help me the most in discovery. Some of my tools include such elements as freewriting and metaphor; the ones I wish to discuss here are the use of structural or organizational forms as heuristics, and metacognitive thinking in the form of metaheuristics.

One of the most important tools in my heuristic toolbox is teaching the use of forms or patterns as exploratory methods. Perkins (1986) argued, “Understanding any piece of knowledge or any product of human intellect involves viewing it as a design, a structure shaped to a purpose” (p. 64). Heuristics are structures “shaped to a purpose,” organizational or design forms that act as tools, and it is this understanding—intellectual design structures can be used to develop knowledge—that students need to learn.

Some English instructors are uncomfortable teaching forms or patterns. However, as de Bono (1991) noted, "We can distinguish between restricting structures and liberating structures" (p. 135). "Tools," said de Bono, "are liberating structures. With the proper tools, students will surprise themselves "with ideas they had not had before" (p. 136). Elbow also emphasized the importance of using structures, forms, or patterns. He defined this kind of thinking and writing as "second-order thinking" (p. 55), and he argued that for learning to exist, there must be categories. He called this "Learning as the Acquisition of Categories": "You only teach someone if you affect the way he files his data, processes his information, or makes his inferences. Teaching or learning involves introducing categories" (11). In other words, the very nature of learning--and therefore of critical thinking--is the use of patterns, designs, or structures. Thinking assumes not only a content but also a structure by which we view the content. As Kant or Hume might have argued, we see the world through colored lens and shape our world accordingly: our experience or expectations give shape and form to how we perceive, and with these shapes we then order our world. The particular shapes—the designs that we use—are heuristic: we use them to not only order our world, but also discover it, explore it, and make sense of it. As David Perkins (1986), who teaches thinking skills at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, stated, we should not be concerned with "what people should do to think well but [rather with] what constitutes knowledge. . . . Understanding any piece of knowledge or any product of human intellect involves viewing it as a design, a structure" (p. 62).

What kinds of structures should we introduce? One of the most popular in the critical thinking movement, whether among communications or other instructors, is problem solving. Problem solving is a method of asking questions: its very nature is heuristic and open-ended. A typical problem-solving structure often involves a process as follows (to which I have added writing steps that are similar): (1) exploring all aspects of the problem (freewriting), (2) developing a goal, a list of solution paths, and a description of each path (organizing), and (3) choosing the best path(s) and evaluating possible outcomes (revising). Like good writing, good problem solving is recursive. Problem solving appeals in particular to practical applications of critical thinking, and instructors in multiple disciplines and in interdisciplinary instruction have developed problem-solving courses at colleges and universities throughout the nation. Many writing instructors in particular have modified their teaching by adding problem-solving elements. The reason they give is that teaching problem solving allows students to perceive thinking in a purer form even as its practical use becomes more obvious as well. Flower (1985), for example, stated that she tells her students that “problem solvers are characterized by two things: a great deal of knowledge about their topic and a large repertory of powerful strategies for attacking their problems. Good writers share these qualities. . . . In the long run, this sort of knowledge about why things work is the best knowledge, because it lets you continue to teach yourself” (3)

There are many other kinds of structures commonly used in writing classes, from traditional rhetorical patterns to the 5 W’s and inverted pyramid of journalism and the heuristic questioning of researchers running experiments. In a sense, any time we require any kind of organizational structure of our students, we are introducing categories, even if on the simplest level. In fact, it is the introduction of such categories that many writing teachers most quickly identify as having something to do with thinking skills in writing, especially, for example, when we talk of requiring our students in research-writing courses to demonstrate higher-order thinking. Such higher-order thinking is exemplified most commonly, perhaps, in Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills (see above), the three highest of which are analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Another example of categories that often are identified with thinking skills are the rhetorical patterns—and traditionally, of these devices, argument often is thought to be the highest because it requires the use of most or all of the others.

However, we must be very careful to separate the concept of structure from the concept of heuristics. What is structured is not always what is heuristic. In other words, it is quite possible to use structure without it involving the heuristic process of searching and discovery. We should not forget de Bono's distinction between liberating and restricting structures (p. 135). Often, the difference is one of method rather than content. In other words, we can have our students use the structure of a rhetorical device such as definition, for example, to restrict the meaning of something already well known, or we can use the device as a quest for them to discover the defining parameters of some hitherto unexamined idea, perception, feeling, or experience. Again—as with freewriting and freethinking—much of the heuristic use of structures depends on questioning. If we conduct discovery by the use of questioning, the structures often become liberating. This is, for example, the method Anselmo, Bernstein, and Schoen (1986) used in their critical-thinking and composition textbook. They started by looking for what they call the "controlling question":

The strategy we concentrate on is a carefully controlled questioning process. . . . To discover what questions would be most useful for this purpose, we read exam questions and term-paper assignments from professors in a wide range of disciplines. . . . We noticed that four patterns seemed to predominate--definition, process, comparison/ contrast, and cause/effect. . . . To probe more deeply . . . a second level of questioning [uses] the four basic patterns combined with other sorts of questions they suggest. (p. vi)

Heuristic structures take many forms in the classroom. In my composition classrooms, for example, they sometimes are rhetorical-mode based, but they more often are loosely based on cumulative thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation; and sometimes they are discipline-based, using such genre-oriented discovery patterns as experiment, client observation, aesthetic analysis, event analysis, or story-telling. I have used rhetorical-, literature-, and discipline-based structures.

One of the most important keys to making such structures heuristic rather than restrictive has been to require students to work with subjects for which they do not yet have clear working definitions and classifications. I ask them to avoid objects and work instead with their lesser-explored feelings, beliefs, people, or events. Then we apply questions. For example, one time when I asked a group of first-year college composition students to compare and contrast an idea, belief, feeling, or person to three similar subjects, a student wrote about her relationship with her boyfriend. She compared and contrasted it to her relationships with her parents, her dog, and her best friend. She suggested that all four relationships "involve care, trust, compassion, and most of all, love." She had several interesting insights: for example, at one point she commented that she and her dog play by barking at each other and, on occasion, her boyfriend and she "also . . . will get in a little tiff and bark at each other." She concluded that each relationship "involve[s] a different kind of love" which is "well suited for the relationship." These ideas were, for an 18-year-old freshman learning to think about her life, far more than formulaic writing. She used comparison-contrast heuristically and probably learned, as well, to transfer the skill better than she might had she been working on an assigned academic subject.

Yet another important set of tools in my heuristic toolbox includes methods of showing students how to build their own tools: how to learn tools for making their own tools. They should, in other words, learn metaheuristics. One metaheuristic is to identify the basic questions being asked in an academic, work, or personal situation. This can be done by having students learn to list or diagram (e.g., as in clustering) all the questions they believe an assignment or situation demands. Then they should try to identify the main question and organize other questions into groups. Sometimes this process of identifying questions should be preceded by freewriting or followed by it; sometimes there needs to be a recursive process of writing, questioning, writing, and revising the questioning. Once the questions are grouped, students can then decide which heuristics to use to seek answers to the questions—and what clarifying questions they may need to ask of others. However, the overall structure they have created—their choice of a main question and their organization of groups of other questions—has been metaheuristically determined.

A second metaheuristic is to structure by analogy. This means that a student can decide what kind of structure to use in one situation by looking at similar situations in his or her past and examining what structures were used in those other situations. If, for example, one asks a student to write creatively about a tree, the student should analogize to past situations in which teachers have asked for creative expression and past situations in which teachers have asked for writing about trees, and then assume that a non-botanical, non-mechanical description is appropriate. This seems simple; however, students miscue frequently enough to suggest that specific training in analogy is appropriate. This is especially true when students must perform more difficult analogical tasks: they might well know, for example, how to analyze conflict between Hamlet and Ophelia, but they still might easily fail to transfer their learning analogically to a conflict at work or in their personal lives. In addition, we need to teach students to analogize from personal or professional situations to academic ones: analogical thinking can work in two opposite directions to help students develop critical thinking skills.

One particularly useful concept in teaching students to analogize is to ask them to solve problems. Problem solving starts with some kind of experience, moves on to analyzing the data and relating it to past experiences, and concludes with tentative decisions. We can teach students to identify the process itself and thereby metaheuristically control it for more accurate retrieval of data, better analogizing, and more careful evaluation. This process, in fact, is quite similar to the process of writing, including recursiveness. Here are some steps to suggest to students, with writing occurring at most or all steps:

3. What steps did you use in each? What steps were common to more than one problem?

One of the elements of such a process is that it is reflexive: it requires students to think about their thinking. There also is recent evidence that good communicators need time to think as they communicate. According to Van Winckel (1983), “Pausing, or the act of reflection during writing, is one step in the composing process that many protocol analysts now agree helps distinguish good writers from poor writers.” Other preconscious reflective events may also occur that aid in questioning.

Other metaheuristics include metaphor, reflective evaluation of other students' writing, reflective evaluation of one's own writing and learning, and metacognitive considerations of one's developing writing skills or, even, one's "writer self."

In conclusion, this paper has offered several methods of using heuristics, some involving exploratory structures and some using metaheuristics. Such methods form part of the core of teaching writing using critical thinking. Another interesting point about critical thinking is that it can be used in most present systems of teaching composition. Whether a course is process, literature, social-epistemic, critical-response, or mode based, eventually what we all desire as teachers is that students learn not only to think well in a variety of ways, but also to transfer what they have learned to other situations—to own the lessons themselves. As Elbow (1986) said, two abilities exist in real learning: one is "the ability to apply already-learned concepts"; the other is “the ability to construct new concepts . . . when a person comes upon data that can't be processed with the concepts he has” (p. 14). Once students know how to think about their thinking, write about their thinking, and think about their writing, they are on an irreversible path of heuristic power to mastery and transference. Teaching them to use heuristics will enable them not only to use discourse as exploration for the rest of their lives, but also to perceive their use of these tools metacognitively and transfer their exploratory tools among as many public and private spheres as they require.

Note: A shorter version of this essay was presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 1993 under the title "Heuristics as Exploratory Discourse," and a longer version appears in the ERIC catalog.

The following is a comparison of different critical thinking and composition activities. It is not at all perfect, nor is it always consistent. It is, however, of value sufficient to encourage thought and discussion. Below, for example, Bloom’s “skills” are represented as stages or steps comparable to the process of writing. However, they would be equally well represented as occurring at each step of process writing as repeating and/or recursive sub steps.

Bloom’s taxo- nomy of skills	Rhetorical modes	Thinking skills	Three mental activities…	…and their questions	Steps of writing
recall comprehension application	description, summary, narration, process	observation, intuition	seeing what is	What do you observe?	expressing, rough-draft thinking
analysis synthesis	classification, analysis, comparison-contrast, definition, cause-effect	deduction, induction	perceiving patterns	What are the parts and wholes?	macro-organizing/ revising
evaluation	argument, pros-cons, dialectic, dialogue	evaluation, negotiation	judging	What are arguments and evaluations of it?	micro-organizing/ revising, editing

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A Note about the Bibliography Style: This essay and its bibliography page are in APA style--the style normally used in the social sciences and psychology. MLA style--the style usually used in English literature and composition courses--is different. For an example of MLA style, see the "Arguing" section's "Theory" page.

Aeschylus. (n.d.) Prometheus bound. (H. W. Smyth, Trans.). Retrieved 28 May 2002 from the World Wide Web: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aesch.+PB+436

Anselmo, T., Bernstein, L., & Schoen, C. (1986). Thinking and writing in college. Boston: Little, Brown.

Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1964). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: David McKay.

Ennis, R. H. (1986). A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities. In J. B. Baron & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice (pp. 9-26). New York: W.H. Freeman.

Hampl, P. (1985, November). Untitled speech at St. Cloud State University , St. Cloud , Minnesota .

Hilgers, T. L. (1980). Training college composition students in the use of freewriting and problem-solving heuristics for rhetorical invention. Research in the Teaching of English 14.4, 293-307.

Meyers, C. (1986). Teaching students to think critically. San Francisco: Jossey.

Miller, H. (1994). Thinking and writing critically with metaphor.” Minnesota English Journal 25.1, 10-20.

Perkins, D. N. (1986). Knowledge as design: Teaching thinking through content. In J. B. Baron & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice (pp. 62-85). New York: W.H. Freeman.

Van Winckel, N. (1983). JAC 8. Retrieved March 15, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/3/Articles/11.htm

Winterowd, W. R. (1979). Brain, rhetoric, and style. In D. McQuade (Ed.). Linguistics, Stylistics, and the Teaching of Composition. (pp. 16?-16?) Akron , Ohio: Dept. of English, U. of Akron Press, pp. 162-7.

Winterowd, W. R., & Winterowd, G. R. (1997). The critical reader, thinker, and writer. Mountain View: Mayfield.

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