WRITING
المؤلف:
John Field
المصدر:
Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P329
2025-10-27
35
WRITING
The writing process is usually represented as falling into a number of stages:
Macro-planning. The writer assembles a set of ideas, drawing upon world knowledge. The writer establishes what the goal of the piece of writing is to be. This includes consideration of the target readership, of the genre of the text (earlier experience as a reader may assist) and of style (level of formality).
Organisation. The writer provisionally organises the ideas, still in abstract form, (a) in relation to the text as a whole and (b) in relation to each other. The ideas are evaluated in terms of their relative importance, and decisions made as to their relative prominence in the text. The outcome may be a set of rough notes.
&Micro-planning. The writer shifts to a different level and begins to plan conceptually at sentence and paragraph level. There is constant reference back to two sets of criteria: to decisions made at earlier stages and to the way in which the text has progressed so far. Account is taken of the overall goals of the text; of the organisational plan and the direction in which the text is currently tending; and of the content of the immediately preceding sentence or paragraph. At this stage, the writer needs to give consideration to whether an individual piece of information is or is not shared with the reader (a) by virtue of shared world knowledge or (b) as a result of earlier mention in the text.
Translation. The propositional content that has been assembled undergoes a process of conversion from abstract to linguistic form. The extent to which the exact language of the text is anticipated appears to vary from writer to writer and from task to task. At times, a fully formed sentence may be constructed. At times, the information to be stored appears to be in the more abbreviated form of key words, of a set of codes to lexical items not yet fully accessed or of a syntactic frame into which such retrieval codes have been inserted. The information is stored in a writing buffer, ensuring that, while executing the first part of the sentence, a writer is aware of how to complete it. The material in the buffer appears to be phonological in form. Hence the often-reported experience of a ‘voice in the head’ while writing. There are a number of possible explanations for this. It may be that a spoken trace is more robust than a written one. Or it may be that future content stored in phonological form is less likely to interfere with the process of putting words on to the page in visual form.
Execution. The writer begins the physical process of writing. Moto neural signals from the brain direct the hand and pen in making letter shapes which are so well practised that they and the between-letter movements that link them have become highly automatised. Writing with a keyboard operates similarly: a letter cue produces a highly automatised finger response. Finger movements are also stored in sets which represent regularly occurring sequences such as THE.
Mistakes of execution sometimes demonstrate that the material in the writing buffer is in phonological form. Up to 20 per cent of Slips of the Keyboard are phonologically related to the target word, with educated writers substituting, for example, their for there or even 28 for 20A. With experienced writers, it is sometimes execution that begins the whole writing process rather than prior planning. The experience of putting words on to a page or screen appears to trigger a kind of writing mode, which enables the writer to loop back into planning and organisation as the text develops.
Monitoring. Self-monitoring while writing is a complex operation at many different levels. At the lowest, it involves checking the accuracy of spelling, punctuation and syntax. At a higher level, it involves examining the current sentence to see how clearly it reflects the writer’s intentions and whether it fits into the developing argument structure of the text. Because monitoring is so demanding, it is subject to attentional constraints. Writers seem to focus on one level at a time. While actually producing text, heed might be paid to lower-level features, with higher-level ones reserved for a later editing stage.
&Editing and revising. Current views of writing treat the process as a recursive rather than a linear one, and place emphasis upon the importance of drafting and redrafting. After monitoring generally while writing, a writer will return to aspects of the text which he/she feels to be unsatisfactory and revise them. The intervention may come after a sentence, after a paragraph or after the whole text has been written. Particular consideration is given to rhetorical issues, not least whether an appropriate degree of formality has been achieved. Studies of redrafting by skilled writers suggest that many of the revisions that are made are at lexical level and represent adjustments to ensure that the right tone is set for the target reader. Monitoring, editing and revising are thus feed-back processes which can impact upon any of the previous stages, causing the writer to revise a macro-plan, to reword translated text or to correct an error of execution.
The most quoted model of writing (Hayes and Flower) identifies two distinct components of the process which are external to it: the writer’s long-term memory (including knowledge of topic, text type and reader) and the immediate task environment. The latter includes the rhetorical problem (consideration of topic, readership and current exigencies), which directs writing decisions. It also includes the text produced so far, against which writing decisions have to be matched.
The Hayes and Flower model aims to give a general account of the writing process. However, it has been criticised for its apparent assumption that the process remains similar across different writers and across different writing tasks. In particular, it does not allow for the major differences that may exist between skilled and less-skilled writers.
See also: Buffer, Inner speech, Typing, Writing: skilled, Writing system
Further reading: Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987); Hayes and Flower (1980); Kellogg (1994)
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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