Cognitive levers: using syntax to shape thought

In world where it’s increasingly easy not to have to write, why bother teaching writing?

Before I try to answer that question, take a look at some of the responses to academic prompts below. Some of them may seem familiar.

• Discuss the causes of the French revolution: The French Revolution happened because bourgeoisie were upset and goods were too expensive.

• Analyze the impact of social media on interpersonal communication: It is either positive or negative depending on how you use it, so it’s complicated.

• Explain how supply and demand affect the price of goods in a market economy: When there’s a lot of demand prices go up and when demand goes down prices go down too.

• Evaluate the effectiveness of government policy on climate change: The government should improve its policies because climate change is destroying the planet.

• Compare and contrast photosynthesis and cellular respiration: Photosynthesis is when plants consume sunlight and cellular respiration is the opposite.

• Describe the benefits or regular cardiovascular exercise: Cardio is effective because it helps your heart and stops you getting fat.

• Explain how to solve a linear equation like 2𝓧 + 5 = 13: You just move the numbers to the other side and then 𝓧 is by itself and you get the answer.

• Analyze how dynamics and tempo contribute to the emotional impact of a piece of music: When a song gets louder and faster you will feel it more intensely.

They’re all technically correct but, reading them, you can’t help but suspect that the writers’ understanding is superficial, partial and imprecise.

In most of the examples it’s clear the writers are aware of some of the academic vocabulary required by the disciplines in which they’re writing but that these concepts are not connected in ways which explore meaning with any fluency or precision.

If we want students to be academically successful we must ensure they are fluent in the language of academic success.

Simply teaching students key words for the concepts that underpin academic disciplines and hoping they’ll connect them together meaningfully is not enough. What follows is a suggestion about what we might try instead.

Here’s a series of propositions I’ve found useful:

• We can only write what we can say - Obviously I don’t mean you have to say something in order to write, I mean you have to be able to say it.

• We can only say what we can think - Again, you can think things you don’t say and you can think things you definitely shouldn’t say, but you have to able to turn an idea in words in your head to be able to say it out loud.

• But, if you can say it, you can write it - Or can you? Wait a minute, I’m imagining you saying, what about those students who have great ideas in class and then struggle to write them down?

If you’ll indulge me, we’re going stray briefly into anecdote territory…. Years ago, I taught a class full of students exactly like this. we’d have great discussions, they come up with wonderful ideas and then, when it came to writing a response they’d say they couldn’t. This frustrated me so much that in one lesson I brought in a dictaphone (this was the old days) and told them I was going to record our discussion and then play it back to them when they said they didn’t know how to start writing.

When I listened to the recording after class, everything became clear. I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to transcribe speech, but it’s hard. Speech and writing are surprisingly different.¹ The recording was full of mumbling, fillers, partially completed thoughts and lots of me saying things like, ‘Did you mean…?’ and then paraphrasing what students had been groping towards.

The reason they couldn’t write what they’d just said is that they hadn’t said anything that would make sense in writing. The final proposition above might be better reformulated as, If you can say it in academic language, then you can write it.

Spoken language relies on tone, gesture and context to make sense but writing has to stand on its own. In order for writing to make sense we’ve invented various artificial devices like spaces between words, punctuation, spelling, page numbers and sentences. None of these exist in speech. No, not even sentences.

We speak in utterances and, although the basic syntax we use follows the same basic use patterns as our writing, it’s much looser and - when transcribed - much more open to ambiguity.

Take this example: I did really well with the burpees this time I lacked in the lunges but overall everything was good.

Can you see the ambiguity? Did the writer do well with the burpees this time, or did they lack in the lunges this time? In the context of speech this would be clear because the speaker would place appropriate emphasis to make themselves clear. In writing we have to use a comma.

This all suggests something important about the role of speech.

To this end, I think it’s useful to explore the idea of using speech and writing can be deployed as cognitive levers. What I mean, is that if we change the way someone can speak we not only affect what they can write but what they can think.

Melody Wong, an English teacher I recently worked with at the International School of Beijing came up with a great formulation for thinking about sentence structure: A sentence is a tool for showing the relationship between concepts.

Have a look at the picture below and write a sentence describing it.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attributed to Bruegel the Elder

Did you notice Icarus?

If you’re not familiar with the painting - and if you didn’t read its title - you can be forgiven for not spotting poor Icarus drowning in the bottom right corner. The picture seems to be suggesting that although this mythic event is taking place (following his escape from King Minos with his father young Icarus flies too close to the sun and his wax wings melt) and it has no impact on the life of anyone else in the scene. Life goes on.²

If you’re struggling to find him, you can see his little legs kicking in the close up below.

The picture is irrelevant. It’s standing in for any curriculum content. The point is, my instruction on how to engage with it, “write a sentence describing it,” did not help you think in a useful way. If instead I’d asked you to write the sentence beginning with the words “At first glance…” you would probably have interacted with the picture differently. The phrase is a cognitive lever to make you think there are deeper layers of meaning to engage with. If there’s something to see at first glance, there must also be something to notice on closer inspection. You still might not have noticed Icarus, but you would have thought differently abou the content.

There are many of these cognitive levers we can pull to prompt different kinds of thought:

And so on.³ Thinking about how we want students to engage with the content we place before them and then prompting the response we want by using one of these cognitive levers is likely to change both students’ ability to think in new and different ways and improve their ability to express the relationships between the concepts they’ve learned about.

This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but as you can see, all the levers use subordinating conjunctions to trigger thought.⁴ Because this structure (subordinating conjunction + subordinate (dependent) clause + comma + independent clause) only usually crops up in writing, getting students to practise constructing sentences using these levers and saying them aloud is very useful as the confidence with which they can use them provides a glimpse into their level of fluency. But ultimately, this practice is about both shaping thought and practising becoming an academic writer.

Weaving in the use of discourse markers to help expand beyond the initial levers is also helpful:

• Adding: and, also, as well as, moreover, too

• Cause & effect: because, so, therefore, thus, consequently

• Sequencing: next, then, first, finally, meanwhile, before, after

• Qualifying: however, although, unless, except, if, as long as, apart from, yet

• Emphasising: above all, in particular, especially, significantly, indeed, notably

• Illustrating: for example, such as, for instance, as revealed by, in the case of

• Comparing: equally, in the same way, similarly, likewise, as with, like

• Contrasting: whereas, instead of, alternatively, otherwise, unlike, on the other hand

These are the tools from which academic writing is built.⁵ Of course you can get GenAI to do all this for you, but what’s point? Academic writing teaches us to think. And, even if you wanted one, there’s no AI tool, as yet, to do our thinking for us.

1. You can peruse some examples of classroom transcripts here.

2. Three brief asides: first, the painting is almost certainly not painted by Bruegel. The curators at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels have helpfully placed a question mark after Bruegel’s name. You probably don’t care but I’m obsessed with the man. Second, there’s a poem by Auden called ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ which explores the idea that ‘stuff just happens’ with reference to this painting. It’s rather good and you can read it here. Third, I’ve shamelessly plundered a blog post Doug Lemov wrote back in 2014.

3. A pdf of the full document can be found here.

4. A subordinating conjunction is a word or phrase that connects a dependent (subordinate) clause to an independent (main) clause, showing the relationship between them. I use these all the time in my teaching so teaching the term and definition really pays off in terms of efficiency of instruction.

5. If you’re interested in seeing how using sentence structures can be taken even further to map out academic discourse in literary analysis, you might find these resources useful. I also discuss this further in my book, Bringing the English Curriculum to Life.