WRITING: SKILLED
Studies have suggested that less-skilled writers pay less attention to higher-level operations– i.e. to the planning and monitoring aspects of text production. They produce less elaborated pre-writing notes, they concern themselves primarily with generating text rather than making time to consider goals and rhetorical implications; and they are often unable to handle major revisions of a text which involve reorganising content.
This has given rise to a distinction (Bereiter and Scardamalia) between two different types of writing. In knowledge-telling, less-skilled or less-experienced writers confine themselves to identifying what they know of a topic and putting it down as it occurs to them. In effect, the first piece of information that is written down generates what comes next. The texts produced are coherent (the approach works well for narrative) but lacking in organisational structure. By contrast, in knowledge-transforming, a writer repeatedly reviews and reorganises material in a problem-solving way. Issues of content are identified, considered and resolved in a content problem space while problems with rhetoric (style, readership, etc.) are similarly dealt with in a rhetorical problem space.
Research into skilled writing has studied how children learn to co ordinate and sequence the many components of the skill– in particular how they learn to store linguistic material before executing it. Early learners focus heavily on the process of forming letters, to the extent that they often mouth syllables as they write them. This would appear to leave few attentional resources for forward planning. However, after about two years, they begin to mouth whole strings of words, suggesting that forward planning is now an option. From the age of ten onwards, there is a close correlation between what children expect to write and what they actually produce. This suggests that they have acquired the capacity to co-ordinate planning and execution. Occasional adult-like errors of execution suggest that, when there are conflicting demands, a primary concern is to maintain words in the buffer rather than (as previously) focusing on form.
Further insights have been obtained by comparing the different processing demands of speech and writing. The child who begins to write has already developed an executive system which co-ordinates the different components of the speaking process. But this system is an interactive one which is heavily dependent upon production signalling in the form of responses by interlocutors. In acquiring writing, the child has to learn new procedures in which additional language is generated from the text itself rather than from outside prompting.
See also: Buffer, Orthography, Writing, Writing system
Further reading: Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987); Kellogg (1994); Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987)
