| This study is a theoretical investigation into the pedagogical implications of characterizing writing as metacognition. Though writing has been variously characterized by researchers ill do fields of composition and literacy, many, even those espousing cognitive theories of writing, have overlooked writing's potential to constitute consciousness.; Drawing primarily on insights from cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, and literary theory, this study characterizes writing as the act of capturing the multidimensional feel of sapient awareness in do serial medium of text. Comparisons between writing and other representational media, most especially pictorial art, demonstrate the capacity of sophisticated, or metacognitive, text to capture this multidimensional experience, much as a picture in perspective both captures and improves upon visual experience.; This investigation posits that the metacognitive writer layers object and metalanguages to represent in textual space the relationships among languaged thoughts in mental space. The metacognitive writer takes a perspective on the propositional content of the text and encodes the relative psychic distance between the perspective point and the content by using textual maneuvers analogous to shading and occlusion in pictorial art. The result of foregrounding and backgrounding propositional content vis-a-vis a perspective point accounts for do textual equivalent of depth perception.; The metacognitive model of writing, once fully articulated, is used as a lens to compare a sample of twenty-three student essays to various examples of professional writing. From this comparison, a taxonomy-in-progress of rhetorical psychic-distancing effects is developed and suggestions for pedagogical applications emerge. |
