Showing papers in "Written Communication in 1985"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe a reading process permeated with individual purposes and schema, or personal maps of the field, which include not only consensual knowledge about the phenomena being discussed, but also perceptions as to the most promising lines of current work, methods that are most likely to produce good results, and personal knowledge about other workers in the field.
Abstract: Reading, as well as writing, is a constructive activity. Interviews and observations of research physicists reveal reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. These schema, or personal maps of the field, include not only consensual knowledge about the phenomena being discussed, but also perceptions as to the most promising lines of current work, methods that are most likely to produce good results, and personal knowledge about the other workers in the field. Schema thus are formed around the active research purposes of the reader. Equally, purposes are framed within the researcher's schematic understanding of the field. With schema and purposes evolving dialectically, texts are read, not as static arguments, but as part of the dynamic process of research activity.
277 citations
TL;DR: In this article, case studies of two proposals for research funding serve as examples of how scientific texts are the products of a community of researchers, and compare successive versions of the proposals show that scientific text is the product of many researchers.
Abstract: Case studies of two proposals for research funding serve as examples of how scientific texts are the products of a community of researchers. Comparisons of successive versions of the proposals show...
153 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify college readers' purposeful behaviors when writing from sources, determine whether these behaviors cluster at identifiable stages in the reading-writing process, and determine whether proficient and less able readers' processes are the same.
Abstract: This protocol study identifies college readers' purposeful behaviors when writing from sources, determines whether these behaviors cluster at identifiable stages in the reading-writing process, and determines whether proficient and less able readers' processes are the same. The results showed that the subjects did not approach the task of writing from sources in the same way. All subjects referred to the reading sources as they composed, but they consulted them at different points in the reading-writing process. Overall the better readers engaged in more planning than the less able group. Findings show strong associations between reading level and use of study-skill reading strategies, postreading-prewriting strategies, and composing strategies.
97 citations
TL;DR: This paper presented a general theory of text processing that delineates the parallel operations in reading and writing, and discussed common information location and retrieval procedures, shared cognitive strategies employed to transform background knowledge into a text world, and the role of context in the production of meaning.
Abstract: This article presents a general theory of text processing that delineates the parallel operations in reading and writing. In particular, the theory discusses (1) common information location and retrieval procedures, (2) shared cognitive strategies employed to transform background knowledge into a text world, and (3) the role of context in the production of meaning.
95 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them as revealed in the stories or reports they wrote or recalled, and in their responses to questions about each.
Abstract: This article explores children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them as revealed in the stories and reports they wrote or recalled, and in their responses to questions about each. There were 67 high achieving children in grades 3,6 and 9 who read and wrote similar kinds of stories and reports. This permitted comparison of ways in which they organized their knowledge across genre (story and report) and domain (reading and writing). Findings indicate the following: (1) Children have strongly differentiated notions of stories and reports and structure stories and reports in different ways from early on; (2) They use these structures in the pieces they read and retell as well as in the pieces they write; (3) Both stories and reports grow in complexity along a variety of measures; and (4) Both stories and reports show increased student control of genre-related organizational structures.
74 citations
TL;DR: The authors compared the performance of students who cooperated on an instruction writing task with students who worked alone, and found that the effects of transfer from a cooperative experience to an individual learning experience were different.
Abstract: This study compared the performance of students who cooperated on an instruction writing task with students who worked alone. The effects of transfer from a cooperative experience to an individual ...
58 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, 60 subjects, 40 of them blockers, provided over 5000 examples of self-talk accompanying the initiation and completion of writing sessions, and an inductive procedure of sorting those thought-list cards into reliable and discrete categories produced seven cognitive components of blocking (listed in descending order of importance): (1) work apprehension, (2) procrastination, (3) dysphoria, (4) impatience, (5) perfectionism, (6) evaluation anxiety, and (7) rules).
Abstract: Sixty subjects, 40 of them blockers, provided over 5000 examples of self-talk accompanying the initiation and completion of writing sessions. An inductive procedure of sorting those thought-list cards into reliable and discrete categories produced 7 cognitive components of blocking (listed in descending order of importance): (1) work apprehension, (2) procrastination, (3) dysphoria, (4) impatience, (5) perfectionism, (6) evaluation anxiety, and (7) rules. Blockers were more likely than nonblockers to list negative thoughts and less likely to evidence “psych-up” thoughts during writing sessions.
48 citations
TL;DR: Incoming freshmen are typically required to write essays which are then holistically rated to determine composition course placement as discussed by the authors.These placement essays vary not only in topic, but also in the...
Abstract: Incoming freshmen are typically required to write essays which are then holistically rated to determine composition course placement. These placement essays vary not only in topic, but also in the ...
30 citations
TL;DR: The authors have proposed explicit guidelines for sorting appropriate from inappropriate anaphoric usage in the unattended anaphorical usage of a writer's work. But they do not specify a set of guidelines for identifying appropriate and inappropriate usage.
Abstract: Experts on style agree that writers frequently have trouble using the unattended anaphoric this clearly. Few, however, have proposed explicit guidelines for sorting appropriate from inappropriate u...
27 citations
TL;DR: This article investigated the role of syntactic and semantic unpredictability in determining readers' evaluations of journalistic prose and found a statistically significant correlation between function-word predictability and reader enjoyment, and a strong correlation between content-word unpredictability and readers' enjoyment.
Abstract: Two studies based on an information theory model of reader enjoyment investigated the role of syntactic and semantic unpredictability in determining readers' evaluations of journalistic prose. In each study, reader enjoyment ratings for a set of articles reporting a single news event were compared with cloze procedure results in which function-word and content-word responses were analyzed separately using entropy and cloze scoring techniques. Both studies revealed a statistically significant correlation between function-word predictability and reader enjoyment. In addition, a strong correlation between content-word unpredictability and reader enjoyment in one study supported the notion that readers prefer texts that are characterized by a high degree of semantic unpredictability.
21 citations
TL;DR: This article found that field independent subjects would produce discourse that would be judged more coherent than the discourse of field dependent subjects, and the primary hypothesis was supported by the data, which indicated significant cognitive style effect, F(6,25) = 4.82, p <0001.
Abstract: The primary hypothesis was that field independent subjects would produce discourse that would be judged more coherent than the discourse of field dependent subjects. A total of 44 subjects in their first term of college composition were selected from a group of 60 volunteers from two universities and a community college. Each subject was administered the Culture Fair Intelligence Test, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and the Group Embedded Figures Test. There were five research conditions: Three evoked oral responses, and one evoked a written response. A group of readers unaware of the nature of the research evaluated each response holistically, rating it in terms of a coherence scale. Coherence scores were then analyzed in relation to cognitive style classification. The primary hypothesis was supported by the data. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated significant cognitive style effect, F(6,25) = 4.82, p <.0001. The correlation between cognitive style and coherence was significant, r(32) ...
TL;DR: The authors apply constructs of the new rhetoric to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation, and demonstrate the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse.
Abstract: Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior...
TL;DR: The authors reported that social-cognitive ability was most strongly related to the oral task (r =.37), weakly related to literary/narrative task, and very weakly (nonsignificantly) related to performance on other writing tasks.
Abstract: This article responds to Burleson and Rowan's (1985) discussion of the relationship between social-cognitive ability and writing skill. A study is reported in which 49 9-year-old children completed a social-cognition task, wrote four compositions (literary/narrative, expressive, referential, and persuasive), and produced oral messages. Correlational analyses showed that social-cognitive ability was most strongly related to the oral task (r = .37), weakly related to the literary/narrative task (r = .25), and very weakly (nonsignificantly) related to performance on the other writing tasks.
TL;DR: Rubin, Piche, Michlin, and Johnson (1984) as mentioned in this paper presented data demonstrating a substantial relationship between social-cognitive ability and narrative writing skill, and certain theoretica...
Abstract: Rubin, Piche, Michlin, and Johnson (1984) recently presented data allegedly demonstrating a substantial relationship between social-cognitive ability and narrative writing skill. Certain theoretica...
TL;DR: In the past 250 years, at least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage as discussed by the authors, and each of them can be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summary that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives.
Abstract: At least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage, especially during the past 250 years. They may be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summaries that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives. Each type of summary developed in response to challenges facing professions, government, business, and ordinary citizens-all of whom have sought to absorb increasing quantities of information being generated in a society that is becoming more complex. This taxonomy offers a definition and brief history for each of the seven techniques, describes the growth of corporations or other organizations that can be considered leading practitioners, and comments on the potential continuing role for each type of summary. The article also focuses on several contemporary issues that will affect future research, classroom writing instruction, and information management in modern computerized offices.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that, like scientific communities, organizational communities are rational enterprises, and they draw on the work of contemporary theorists (Polanyi, Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Perelman, and others) to support the notion of rational enterprises.
Abstract: Commentary: It is easier to articulate the issues addressed in this piece today than it was when Written Communication first published it in 1985; we now have the familiar idioms of postmodernism, cultural studies, and reception theory to help illuminate the paradigm that we were arguing governs everyday communication behavior in organizations. In particular, while terms such as contingency, intersubjectivity, shared understandings, social construction of meaning, and discourse communities were familiar enough at the time in the fields of philosophy and critical theory, they had not yet influenced textbooks in organizational communication. Instead, these textbooks were dominated by the human resource and social systems models of the organization at work and by prescriptive approaches to writing.We drew on the work of contemporary theorists (Polanyi, Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Perelman, and others) to support the notion that, like scientific communities, organizational communities are “rational enterprises” th...
TL;DR: This article provided a list of the kinds of language learning underway in the elementary school years and suggested that teachers may use this list to anticipate where and how such learning will influence the writing processes of children.
Abstract: Readers and evaluators of children's writing still fall back on deficit explanations; papers are read for signs of what they lack rather than signs of growth. Presented here is a model that predicts how such growth may occur as a logical outcome of language acquisition. Drawing on research done in the past, the article provides a list of the kinds of language learning underway in the elementary school years and suggests that teachers may use this list to anticipate where and how such learning will influence the writing processes of children. Included in the list are sentence syntax, spelling conventions, and discourse grammars, all of which seem to be learned by “creative construction” (hypothesis building and refinement) and, to some extent, memorization. The article argues that children's writing performance is likely to suffer on one or more writing dimensions as the writer selectively attends to other dimensions of the task. For evaluators and teachers there are implications for feedback, for individu...
TL;DR: The authors traces a parallel but much less investigated line of argumentation discourse from classical to modern times, and proposes a theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical-to-modern times.
Abstract: Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentation discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This article traces a parallel but much less investigated str...
TL;DR: The authors examined free writing in a second grade classroom from the perspectives of the classroom teacher and selected class members, using observation notes, audiotaped recordings of the children's talk while writing, written products, and child interviews.
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to examine one type of literacy event in a second grade classroom—“free writing” and, especially, its sharing time phase—from the perspectives of the classroom teacher and selected class members. The study was based on data collected over a 14-week period in a second-grade classroom. Data gathered included observation notes, audiotaped recordings of the children's talk while writing, written products, and child interviews. The study's findings suggest a social fact or dynamic operating in classrooms that has implications for both researchers and practitioners concerned with school writing; that dynamic is the individual child's social life within the classroom itself and, particularly, his or her social interpretations of school writing tasks (what each is trying to do, for whom, and why).
TL;DR: Our own problems in teaching writing have recurrently presented themselves in forms that nineteenth-century teachers easily would have recognized as mentioned in this paper, and we also dwell within a "reform tradition" that stresses the importance of students' interests and experience and continues to see the writing task as based on what used to be called synthetic insights and self-active learning.
Abstract: Commentary: English composition as we know it began in the early nineteenth century...but why is that important? Why would we care about poorly educated grammar school pedagogues—our distant colleagues!—fingers aching with cold as they parsed sentences, heard recitations, and fed the wood stove during those long wintery terms?Very simply, because their lives, practices, and less frequently, their writings give us back ourselves. Our own problems in teaching writing have recurrently presented themselves in forms that nineteenth-century teachers easily would have recognized.Like them, we sense the ongoing need for hard basics, the primitive core of our profession. Yet like those early teachers, we also dwell within a “reform tradition” that stresses the importance of students' interests and experience and continues to see the writing task as based on what used to be called “synthetic” insights and “self-active” learning. Inspired partly by romantic educational theories from the continent, this tradition gre...
TL;DR: The authors found that readers recall syntactic subjects very poorly and that the frequent correspondence between syntactic subject and sentence topic has significant negative effects on readers' processing of and perceptions about texts.
Abstract: In sentences with validity markers in the syntactic subject and adjacent positions, the frequent correspondence between syntactic subject and sentence topic in English sentences is broken. Because this correspondence has been shown to have substantial and positive effects upon readers' processing of and perceptions about texts, breaking the correspondence might have significant negative effects on readers. This study begins to explore how such syntactic subjects affect readers. It shows that readers recall such subjects very poorly, but it also suggests that in order to discover more precisely how readers represent such subjects in memory, new and rich models of language and of possible domains in texts will be needed.
TL;DR: The authors developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories, and found that the style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloZE sentences of less experienced students.
Abstract: Ability to vary one's style is an important skill of mature writing, and it would be useful to have tests of this skill. We developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories. The style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloze sentences of less experienced students. Style differences, between experienced and inexperienced students, appeared in average sentence lengths, sentence types, and verb-adjective ratios. In another experiment, less experienced students were given explicit instructions to imitate story style; they showed virtually the same adaptability to style as the creative writing group in the first experiment. Thus we have evidence that the cloze test measures style differences between experienced and less experienced writers, and also that responsiveness to style features, distinct from the...
TL;DR: In this paper, a critical area in the advancement of literacy is the production of textbooks that reflect recent insights on language and discourse, but this project is problematic within the established pro...
Abstract: A critical area in the advancement of literacy is the production of textbooks that reflect recent insights on language and discourse. However, this project is problematic within the established pro...
TL;DR: The scientismic view, however, is flawed in three ways: its failure to account adequately for episodic knowledge, to view language as an event, and to understand modes as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The social sciences and humanities bring different attitudes and methods to the problem of meaning. From the “scientismic” point of view, meaning is quantifiable and is largely what Tulving called “verbal” knowledge. The scientismic view, however, is flawed in three ways: its failure to account adequately for “episodic” knowledge, to view language as an event, and to understand modes. The literarist view of meaning is equally flawed. However, the scientismists have most of the political power; hence, the literarists are losing the battle for their set of values and their versions of literacy. A realignment of literary studies under the aegis of rhetoric is necessary.
TL;DR: This paper found that only 45 or 11.6% of the 386 respondents actually used grading scales in their evaluations of freshman composition, and that the theoretical interest in using grading scales is not matched by their use by teachers of composition.
Abstract: Some of the attempts to establish what standards can define acceptable writing have resulted in the development of grading scales of one sort or another. The controversy about using grading scales to evaluate written composition has received much attention in research and in theory over the past 50 years, but the results of a survey of 600 members of the College Section of National Council of Teachers of English revealed that in the spring of 1984 only 45 or 11.6% of the 386 respondents actually used scales in their evaluations of freshman composition. The theoretical interest in these scales is apparently not matched by their use by teachers of freshman composition.