Cognitive rhetoric

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cognitive rhetoric is an approach to rhetoric, writing, and teaching that also draws on ideas from cognitive science. It views meaning and communication as rooted in how people think, learn, and understand the world.

History in brief
After the cognitive revolution, scholars from cognitive linguistics, computer science, and psychology borrowed terms from rhetoric and literary criticism. Metaphor, in particular, became a central idea in cognitive science because how we understand meaning often depends on metaphor. Researchers also explored ideas like scripts, stories, stream of consciousness, and how readers respond to texts, as well as how poetry is shared in oral traditions.

What this means for composition and teaching
Rhetoric and writing instruction have ancient roots in Greece and Rome, where rhetoric was a teachable craft. In cognitive rhetoric, writing is seen as a problem‑solving activity similar to other thinking tasks. Researchers like Linda Flower and John Hayes studied writing by having people think aloud as they write, showing how minds work during the writing process. Janet Emig distinguished between speaking and writing acts, arguing that writing is shaped by experience and can trap the writer if the form dictates the content. Patricia Bizzell emphasized flexible approaches: students move through different thinking styles and social contexts, adapting to the demands of each discourse community. James A. Berlin warned that focusing only on professional writing and ignoring ideology could make rhetoric serve corporate interests; he contrasted this with social‑epistemic rhetoric, which centers ideology in teaching writing.

Language, literature, and cognitive science
Cognitive rhetoric offers a way to study literature using cognitive science methods. It aims for interdisciplinary, testable ideas and uses rhetorical devices as clues to how readers and writers process text. Mark Turner’s idea of narrative imaging suggests that people understand the world through everyday storytelling and blending of ideas, a process that helps with planning, explaining, remembering, and imagining. This view sees storytelling as a deeply practical, cognitive activity that predates language in some ways.

Key ideas and terms
- Conceptual blending: combining different mental spaces to create new meanings.
- Conceptual metaphor: understanding one idea through another (often abstract concepts shown via metaphor).
- Projection: how we mentally extend or map ideas into imagined futures or other contexts.
- Binding and cognitive stability: how ideas stick together in our minds while thinking and writing.

Notable researchers
Ellen Spolsky, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, Raymond Gibbs, Reuven Tsur, and Todd Oakley are among those linked to cognitive rhetoric and its development.

Cognitive rhetoric in practice
In pedagogy, it connects how people think with how they write and teaches students to be aware of their mental processes, adapt to different writing situations, and use storytelling and metaphor to make ideas clearer. It also builds bridges between writing studies and fields like cognitive science, linguistics, and literary studies, offering tools to study how readers understand texts and how writers plan and revise their work.