"'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose'"

Whether we attempt to describe and explain the cognitive differences between those who write well and those who write poorly using "studies of cognitive style," "popular articles on brain research," "Piaget's work on the development of logical thought," or the work of "orality-literacy theorists" (267), any conclusions we may come to are, according to Mike Rose, naively generalistic and hopelessly reductive. Rose may be right in his recognition that "cognitive reductionism" mistakenly presumes that "unsuccessful writers think in fundamentally different ways from successful writers" (ibid.). So maybe the difference between "good" writers and "bad" writers involves more than simply cognition, for certainly there are other factors to consider, factors cultural, societal, etc. So then the question becomes, "How do we go about judging the thought processes involved with reading and writing when performance is problematic, ineffective, or stunted?" (297), particularly when every approach so far is just more of the same but by some other name? If it is even possible, we must first recognize, as Rose does, that "human cognition... is rich and varied" (ibid.). Such richness and variety precludes theories that don't directly attempt to explain the cognitive differences, if any, that exist between writers; moreover, any theory that does attempt to do so must be considered provisional only, recognizing the transformative nature of language qua literacy, and the protean processes involved in cognition qua thinking, covering a complex spectrum of histories, cultures, and peoples who possess the same abilities to both think and write, but do so in decidedly different ways.