Writing(s) at the Crossroads

Abstract

Sociocultural theory argues that activity is situated in concrete interactions that are simultaneously improvised locally and mediated by prefabricated, historically provided tools and practices, which range from machines, made objects, semiotic

Discovery Through Writing: Relationships with Writing Processes and Text Quality

“…The dual-process account (Galbraith, 1999(Galbraith, , 2009Galbraith & Baaijen, 2015) accepts the problem-solving account of the contribution of explicit thinking to discovery and text quality, but provides an alternative account of the contribution of text production. This results in a different overall conception of how discovery occurs.…”

“…Similar dual-process theories, in which content is either directly retrieved or is synthesized from semantic material, account for a wide range of memory retrieval phenomena (Brainerd, Wright, Reyna, & Payne, 2002). According to the dual-process account (Galbraith, 1999(Galbraith, , 2009Galbraith & Baaijen, 2015), the effects of explicit problem-solving and text production on discovery vary depending on which of these systems predominates. Thus, explicit problem-solving is more effective when it operates on the stable representations of individual ideas in episodic memory and is less effective when it operates on emergent ideas as they are being constituted under the control of the semantic memory system.…”

The Work of Writing: Raiding the Inarticulate

“…Of interest, however, there were no differences in the extent to which low and high self-monitors introduced new ideas or rhetorical headings during outlining, or in the quality of the final text. This suggests that it is not the amount of content change that is important as the extent to which content is differentiated into separate ideas organized in terms of rhetorical goals (later confirmed in a reanalysis by Galbraith & Baaijen, 2015) and, further, that although low self-monitors may change their ideas less according to context (Klein et al, 2004), they are able to construct rhetorically organized outlines when explicitly instructed to do so, with the same effects on text quality as for high self-monitors.…”

“…The key feature is that, for the writer's disposition to be fully captured in the text, it must be allowed to guide processing over successive sentences, free from external planning. Galbraith and Baaijen (2015) described the knowledgeconstituting model as a system designed for action, noting that the function of a distributed representation is not just to represent the regularities induced from experience but also to provide resources for acting in the present. The representation of experience as a single set of connections within the writer's disposition means that the structure controlling the synthesis of content is influenced by all the writer's past experiences; the variability of the patterns that can be formed as the output of the network means that the network can then synthesize content appropriate to novel contexts.…”

“…Galbraith (2009) previously characterized the two processes as a distinction between a knowledge-constituting system and a knowledge-retrieval system, emphasizing the distinction between the representations on which the two processes operate. Galbraith and Baaijen (2015) characterized them in terms of their functions as a system designed for action, enabling the writer to use the totality of their learning history to synthesize a response to a novel context, and as a system designed for reflection, enabling the writer to consciously survey and modify their knowledge. In the following summary, although both these characterizations still apply, we refer to them as the knowledge-constituting process and the knowledge-transforming process.…”