![]() For the first essay, the students planned and wrote as they normally would. Ransdell and her collaborators asked 125 students to write three essays on given topics, such as what makes for a good college professor. However, Ransdell's research suggests that encouraging students to embrace the chaos inherent to the writing process can result in better papers. One common strategy is to plot one's thoughts in outline form before starting to write. Some approach this challenge by separating out writing tasks. Creating one that furthers an argument while fitting logically into a paragraph-or an even longer structure-is almost too much to ask fledgling writers to do all at once, he notes. Creating a grammatical sentence is difficult enough. One potential area for improvement, says Kellogg, is helping people handle multiple writing tasks at the same time (see "Writing exercises all aspects of working memory"). "If we are going to make improvements, we will need to understand more about the basic science of writing," Kellogg says. A case in point: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress-which includes an essay test given to randomly selected students every four years-only about 2 percent of high school students graduated with advanced writing skills in 2002. There is little consensus among teachers or researchers about how to tailor writing instruction, says Kellogg, and as a result, many people never learn to write well. "There is no one-size-fits-all solution to teaching a skill as complex as writing," Ransdell notes. However, in-press work by a team of researchers in England suggests that a particular subset of students may benefit from outlining, while others may do best with a strategy of revising as they compose. In fact, research by Ransdell, published in the book "Studies in Writing" (Kluwer, 2002), shows that asking students to engage in a stepwise process results in lower-quality writing. Perhaps because of the inherent disorder behind good writing, traditional writing instruction-teaching students to separate planning from writing, and writing from revising-can be counterproductive, argues Ransdell. ![]() "You write to transform your abstract thoughts into concrete ones." "Writing is not just dumping what you know onto a page," he says. ![]() Or another may write something she wasn't aware she thought and then pursue it, even if it doesn't fit into her original outline, notes Ronald Kellogg, PhD, a writing researcher and head of the psychology department at Saint Louis University. "The best writers move around a lot, and at any given moment there is a high probability of them doing any of these things," Ransdell says.įor instance, a skilled writer may type a sentence and then realize that it belongs elsewhere in the composition-a quick jump from composing to revising. Rather than following a series of steps-first planning, then writing, then revising-good writers do all three nearly simultaneously, according to Ransdell's research. In fact, some studies suggest that the messier the thought process, the clearer the prose, says psychologist Sarah Ransdell, PhD, a writing-cognition researcher and professor at Nova Southeastern University. And they are finding that writing seems to require people to juggle multiple, often conflicting processes simultaneously. ![]() "I am so busy writing I don't stop to think about how I am doing it," she says.īut although the writing process may be opaque to many authors, cognitive scientists are attempting to understand the thinking that goes into writing. And she wrote that much only because the book's publishers insisted on it. ![]() In fact, Westfall devoted just two pages of her book "Beyond Intuition: A Guide to Writing and Editing Magazine Nonfiction" (Allyn & Bacon, 1993), to the topic of how to pull one's tangle of ideas into a coherent story. Patricia Westfall, a writing professor at Ohio University, doesn't like to think about the writing process, even though she puts pen to paper up to 16 hours a week. ![]()
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