Structured Heuristic Procedures: Their Limitations

Abstract

To help students invent or prewrite or limit a subject, many composition specialists advocate teaching students to use structured heuristic procedures-conscious, deliberate search strategies such as Burke's Pentad or Young, Becker and Pike's tagmemic questions. According to these specialists, such help students to explore problems for seminal elements of a solution (Janice Lauer). 1 They enhance students' interpretive powers (Mike Rose).2 They focus attention, guide reason, stimulate memory and encourage intuition (Richard Young).3 More than that, they help students to generate content. Used in different combinations, they can yield abundant raw material (Erika Lindemann),4 help students to dredge up ideas from their subconscious (William Irmscher),5 help students to explore systematically everything they know about a (Linda Flower),6 and provide insights and ideas for any subject (Laurie Kirszner and Stephen Mandel).7 Although I find such claims interesting, I suspect that they are too optimistic and suggest to students oversimplified approaches to heuristic thinking in general. Teachers often qualify the advice they give students, yet their qualifications tend to become lost in their enthusiasm for structured heuristic procedures. Flower suggests that although such are only high probability ways to proceed, for problems like writing, heuristics are the most dependable and most creative way to go.18 Similarly, Young emphasizes that even though deliberate heuristic search is not infallible, it makes data gathering more efficient and increases the likelihood that the account be adequate. 9 Winterowd suggests that although all may not be useful, students should try to understand all of the procedures he recommends so that the will become part of [their] equipment for thinking.10 And Beth Neman tells teachers in her methods text, If care is not exercised, the complex means [of structured heuristic search] can sometimes assume an importance far beyond-even incongruous with-the simple end of a wellwritten paper,11 but she simplifies the problem in her textbook for students,