5 Methodology: From speaking about writing to tracking text production

Abstract

Doing writing research from an applied linguistics perspective means investigating individual, collaborative, and organizational writing and text production as language-based activities in complex and dynamic real-life contexts. In doing so, micro and macro levels, product and process perspectives, as well as theoretical and practical questions are combined in transdisciplinary approaches. Appropriate methods have to be deliberately chosen and transparently explained across disciplinary boundaries. Methodological questions need to be clarified, such as: which method fits which problem -and how should and can various methods complement each other?In this chapter, we start from two methodologically complementary ways of doing research into real-life writing processes (Part 1). These approaches illustrate why collecting data represents a key problem in the history of writing research (2). We then outline a typology of state-of-the-art methods in writing research (3) and explain challenges of combining perspectives and methods in research projects (4). This allows us to evaluate what sophisticated methodology in writing research can contribute to applied linguistics (5) and to conclude by sketching a related research roadmap (6). In the reference section, we focus on work combining approaches from writing research and applied linguistics in methodologically innovative ways (7).

Writing in the context of unstable norms: teaching portfolios as a genre of academic recruitment

“…Thus, the present analysis goes beyond the text as an artefact and asks “what is significant and at stake for writers” (Lillis, : 367). The analysis focuses, in particular, on the evaluative “metadiscursive” comments interviewees express with respect to genre norms and genre use (see Grésillon & Perrin, ; Jaworski, Coupland, & Galasiński, ). These comments relate to specific forms of expression (e.g., self‐mention) and broader stylistic choices (e.g., the use of evaluative language), as well as projections of what assumed readers might expect.…”

Comprehensibility and comprehensiveness of financial analysts’ reports

“…Denzin, 2012;Grésillon & Perrin, 2014) complementary methods to investigate text production, text products, and their reception. In the present paper, however, we focus on a product perspective and, within the range of methods to analyze text products, on pragmatic text analysis (3.1) to investigate (3.2) the comprehensibility (3.3) and comprehensiveness (3.4) of the text and develop appropriate measures to increase their communicative potential (3.5).…”

Organic Visualization of Document Evolution

“…As in Perrin's S -notation [12], we group adjacent operations in such a way that no voluntary change in cursor position takes place between any two of them. This results in condensed operations we call (linear keystroke) bursts, which are more coherent and significant than single keystrokes because insertions that were immediately deleted are lost, such as correction of typographical errors (which correspond to low-level information in the writing process [6]). Finally, we reorder bursts spatially rather than temporally, as pieces of a puzzle that join one to another by the structural points we call Places of Insertion (POIs), which are the points between characters and elements in a document where the blinking cursor can be at.…”

“…There is little work on visualization of the process itself that generates a document, particularly in the case of the human writing process [6]. The challenge here is to understand the structure and evolution of text according to several updates, each of which may add new content and/or delete prior content.…”