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presented here supports that hypothesis” (15). To Shapiro,
however, this “evidence” raises more questions than it answers,
the most begging of these being, “Do students at higher levels
of intellectual maturity write better because they think better,
or is it possible that the act of writing itself generates the
disequilibrium which leads to cognitive development” (18)?
While she frames her question as “a classic ‘chicken or egg’
quandary,” with her reports’ contention that “Rhetorical
Maturity” is greatly determined by “contextual relativism” (3),
“the writer’s ability to accommodate to his readers” (6) and
“assess […] readers’ needs more accurately” (15), her evidence
would seem to assert, implicitly, the necessity of those student
writers’ working, writing and thinking, within a “community,” an
audience and, thusly, a context for which and in which to write,
as well as its heavy influence upon that relationship between
their “intellectual maturity” and their “rhetorical maturity,”
the two very likely existing within a dialectic, the one pushing
and pulling the other. Again, “reconstructive collaboration.”
This heavy influence would be defined much more explicitly
in the early ‘90s with two other research essays: Sue Dinitz
and Jean Kiedaisch’s “Persuasion from an Eighteen-Year-Old’s
Perspective” from 1990 and Toni-Lee Capossela’s “Using William
Perry’s Scheme to Encourage Critical Writing.” With them both,
that “community” of student writers, as well as the writing
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