Radiolab: “His eyes grew wider and wider, and he [slapped] his hands on the table [and realized] ‘Oh! Everything has a name!'”
That moment of Ildefonso’s insight is almost an enviable one if not for the prolonged vacancy that nested it. Aside from enabling a more succinct communication, that realization opened the complex and ubiquitous world of symbolism. Emig’s “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” establishes symbolic nature of language: “What is striking about writing as a process is that….the symbolic transformation of experience through the specific symbol system of verbal language is shaped into an icon (the graphic product) by the enactive hand. If the most efficacious learning occurs when learning is re-inforce, then writing through its inherent re-inforcing cycle involving hand, eye, and brain marks a uniquely powerful multi-representational mode for learning.” (124) What Ildefonso gained in that moment was not only a system of categorization, but the most useful (and usually granted) learning tool at out disposal: communicative ability. Because that’s all learning really is–the transference of knowledge from an object or other to your own understanding and concept. Without knowing of the symbolic nature of our understanding of the world, that understanding cannot be shared. “The medium then of written verbal language requires the establishment of systematic connections and relationships. Clear writing by definition is that writing which signals without ambiguity the nature of conceptual relationships.” (Emig 126)
This basic truth speaks to a smaller one my students have started to tussle with. Most of them are now at a level of writing were subject conceptualization and argumentative prowess are their major hindrances. The base issue, I’m starting to hypothesize, is that their concentrations lie too much with appeasing some amorphous standard they’ve been set them to (Avoid article-speak and extemporaneous writing, proper source utilization), and less on constructing a cohesive, inter-connected argument. Instead, the focus should be, as Emig postulates, on the relationships between whatever concepts are subject to their molding.