The development of a writing system that reflects speech and conveys thought is one of the most significant of humanity's hierarchical creations.
Our ancestral accountants were perhaps the first to see the need to keep written 1 records. The Sumerian markings evolved into what is called a pictographic system fer representing the many ideas needed in daily communication. From this system came the Sumerian cuneiform script about 5,000 years ago and the well-known hieroglyphics of the Egyptians came soon after.
Most of the world languages today employ alphabets, a form of phonetic writing that first appeared a mere 3,500 years ago in the Sinai desert. A small number of letters represent the sounds that carry meaning. By combining these letters, the writer can efficiently represent all the words possible in a language. The invention of an alphabet represented the final step in the evolution of written communication. With the tool of the alphabet, modern human beings carved out the cultural and intellectual life that we enjoy today.
In the present lesson we will discuss the various cognitive tasks such as planning, generating sentences and revision that are involved in writing.
COMPARING SPEAKING AND WRITING
Naturally speaking and writing share many similar cognitive components. However, Ellis and Beattie (1986) point out some differing characteristics. Compared to speaking,Writing is more likely to:
i) Occur in isolation from other people;
ii) Involve delayed social feedback (if any);
iii) Require extensive revising and editing;
iv) lnvolve syntactically and lexically complex language; and
v) Be recorded in a potentially permanent form.
In one study comparing speaking and writing, Chafe and Danielewicz ( 1987) examined professors and graduate students. These researchers collected both formal and informal samples of speech (in lectures and in casual conversation) and writing (in professional articles and in personal letters ). The comparison revealed that written language showed significantly more varied vocabulary than spoken language, whether formal or informal. In contrast, spoken language was much more likely than written language to include hedges, which are phrases-such as sort of and kind of-that limit the generality of the statement. Spoken language was also much more likely to show involvement with the audience and reference to oneself.
COGNITIVE TASKS INVOLVED IN WRITING
Writing by hand with a pen or pencil is an important skill to understand. We have written by hand for centuries and will no doubt continue to do so even with the availability of word processors that use keyboards or voice input.
Hays and Flower model has described the cognitive tasks that comprise writing. These include planning, sentence generating and revising. However, these tasks often overlap. For example, you may be planning your overall writing strategy while generating parts of several sentences. All components of the task that are involved in writing are complex. As flower and Hayes described the process : "Writing is the act of dealing with an excessive number of simultaneous demands or constraints". Viewed this way, a writer in the act is a thinker on a full-time cognitive overload. Still, we manage to coordinate these tasks quite skillfully as we produce written language.
Now we will consider the cognitive tasks involved in writing in detail.
Planning
Planning refers to generating ideas, and setting goals to achieve during writing. Planning can be seen as invoking the reasoning, decision-making, problem solving, and other high level thinking aspects of writing.
A writing plan includes at least three kinds of elements:
i) Goals to express content knowledge about the topic;
ii) Goals unrelated to content, such as the form of the essay or persuasive technique~; and
iii) Goals to use certain words and phrases that sound appropriate.
Research by Hayes ( 1989) shows that the amount of planning and the quality of planning are highly correlated with the quality of the written text
Research by Kellogg ( 1988, 1990) strongly supports the strategy cf planning or out lining before beginning to write. College student who were instructed to prepare a written outline later wrote significantly better essays than students in a control group.
Kellogg suggest that an outline may help to alleviate attention overload while writing, as the outline involves broader headings, ideas etc. For example the structure at the beginning of every lesson may serve as an outline of the contents, which the writer follows them in a sequence. And an outline helps sort these ideas into an orderly, linear sequence.
Some researchers have begun to explore how the planning process is influenced by using a computer. Results suggested that writers were less likely to pre-plan writing when they used a computer than when they used pen and paper. They also planned less at a conceptual level when they used a computer.
Sentence Generation
Sentence generating, or translating, refers to the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic operations involved in putting ideas into words. The assumption is that the thoughts of a writer-coded as propositions, phonological images of words or short phrases, or visual images of objects or events must be translated into sentences).
One important characteristic of sentence generation is that the final essay is typically at least eight times longer than even the most elaborate outline. Another important characteristic is that hesitant phases tend to alternate with fluent phases. For example hesitant phases like Oh, No, what, yeah etc., may occur in between the fluent phases, with some pauses of 2 seconds or more.
Revision
Revision involves reconsidering i.e. revising the written matter.
In order to revise what you have written, you need to reconsider the goals of the text, to predict how well the.text accomplishes these goals, and to propose improved I ways to accomplish those goals."
Revision or reviewing refers to the reading of the text being produced, and evaluating and editing it. In reviewing the writer must step back from the text produced so far and take the potential reader's point of view. If the meaning of the text does not match what the writer had intended, then further planning and sentence generation are needed.
College students show tremendous individual differences in this area. Hayes studied college students who were writing research papers for a class. Some students revised their original papers dramatically, often completely abandoning earlier drafts to begin a new version. Others showed little or no global revision, making changes only at the word or sentence level.
In another study, Hayes and his colleagues (1987) compared the revision capabilities of seven expert writers and seven first year college students. Every one was given the same poorly written two-page letter and was asked to revise it for an audience of young college students. The first year students were likely to approach the text one sentence at a time, fixing relatively minor problems with spelling and grammar, but ignoring problems of organization, focus, and transition between ideas. The students were also more likely to judge some defective sentences as being appropriate. Finally, the students were less likely than the expert writers to diagnose the source of a problem with a sentence.
In other situations, however, expertise can be a drawback. Specifically, experts who know too much, may not recognize that the text could be unclear to readers with little background knowledge.
Ideally, writers should be sensitive to grammatical and organizational problems when they are revising a writing sample. However, they must also be able to adopt the viewpoint of a naive reader, who may not have enough background knowledge to understand a difficult technical paper.
The above cognitive processes that are, planning sentence generation and revision are fueled in part by the knowledge and skills stored in long-term memory. At the same time, they are constrained by the nature of the writing assignment itself and the way that the text has taken shape so far. Thus the way one plans, generates sentences, and revises will depend on a number of factors. How much writers know about the topic at hand and in general would certainly affect the dynamics of the composing process. Planning may be extremely time consuming and rich for highly knowledgeable writers but brief and impoverished for others. A deal line to finish the assignment illustrates one motivating cue that profoundly affects how much planning and revision one does.
By examining verbal protocols of writers, Flower and Hayes (1980) concluded that writers are trying to meet several simultaneous demands and constraints. Consider their description of the process. We know that when people write, they draw upon a variety of mental operations such as making plans, retrieving ideas from memory, drawing inferences, creating concepts, developing an image of the reader, testing what they have written against that ,image, and so on. To produce any given utterance, the writer must integrate a great number of skills and meet a number of demands more or less all at once ...... viewed this way, a writer in the act is a thinker on full time cognitive over load".
One consequence of this view is that planning, translating, and reviewing do not occur in sequence. Instead, the fundamental processes are highly recursive at all stages of development of a text i.e. all three processes are interwoven.
Another consequence is that writing places heavy demands on the attentional or working memory system. Hay and Flower also concluded that writers. Cope with the demands of writing by designing plans such as outlining.
SUMMARY
Writing is an isolated task with less social feedback. It involves extensive revision and complex language and is also more permanent than speech. Cognitive tasks involved in writing include planning, sentence generating, and revising. The quality of writing is related to the amount and the quality of planning; outlining also enhances writing quality. When people generate sentences during writing, the final essay is much longer than the outline; writer's fluent phases alternate with hesitant phases. Expert writers are more likely than beginning college students to revise the organization, focus, and transitions in a paper; they arc also more likely to notice defective sentences and to diagnose their specific problem; however, people who have background knowledge in an area may not be sensitive to the difficulties the text would present for naive readers. Planning, sentence generation, and revision do not occur in a sequence but are repetitively interwoven throughout all phases of creating a text.