The Psychology of Written Composition

Abstract

The subject of this book is the mental activities that go into composing written texts. For brevity we will often refer to the subject simply as writing, but the term should not be taken too literally. In this book we are not concerned with the physical act of writing, except insofar as it influences other processes. The mental activities of writing considered in our research are the same kinds of higher mental processes that figure in cognitive research on all aspects of human intelligence. They include goal setting, planning, memory search, problem solving, evaluation, and diagnosis. Writing is, of course, easily recognized as an activity in which a good deal of human intelligence is put to use. Its neglect, until very recently, by cognitive scientists is, however, easy to understand. Cognitive research has been gradually working its way from well-defined to ill-defined problems, from tasks that draw on limited knowledge to tasks that draw on large bodies of knowledge, and from tasks that are easily constrained experimentally to ones that are more susceptible to intentions of the participants. On all of these counts, writing lies far out on the yet-to-be-reached end of the continuum.

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