Psych 303

Goldman, Spring 2002

2/18, 2/20

I. Review the Hayes and Flower (1980) model.

The diagram shows the various elements of the writing process.

How do we read this diagram? What do the boxes and the arrows mean?

Key Points:

1. The task environment is comprised of the assignment and whatever text you’ve produced. That environment influences the Planning – Translating – and Revising elements of the process.

If it did not influence those, you’d have no way of ensuring that what you were writing was meeting the constraints of the audience or topic.

2. Planning is responsive to the topic and audience. So you’d expect that the decisions made in planning would be different depending on your topic.

If you were writing about health and beauty aids for a teenage magazine your planning would differ from what you’d plan if your were writing for an audience of health professionals.

3. Differences responsive to the task environment come out in what you select from what you generate and in how it is organized. Generated material is filtered through goal setting; you want what you select to contribute to meeting the goals you set for dealing with topic and audience.

Generation is based on what you know, represented as present in the writer’s long term memory. There are many kinds of knowledge –

topic knowledge (what you already knew and what you have knowledge of through literature search or experimentation you conduct),

knowledge of the audience (what they know, what it will take to “reach” them with your message, their biases, etc.),

knowledge of writing plans – this is rhetorical knowledge. Knowledge of the content and structure of different genre. Argument structure, narratives, biographies, stories.

Brainstorming and Asking Questions (discussed in SWM pp. 22, 23) are ways to generate.

A brainstorming activity:

Three statements of research findings. Suppose you were going to do research to verify or disconfirm them.

For the first one, generate terms you might use to uncover information and ideas, to organize your argument.

From Self, February 2002, pg. 59

“Brain-boosting greens. Munching on spinach migh tincrease your mental ability, say researchers from the James Haley VA Medical Center in Tampa, Florida. Antioxidants in the leafy green blocked memory-killing free radicals in animals – and that may mean less age-related learning loss for us. Want an even smarter salad? Mix spinach with other antioxidant-packed greens, like romaine lettuce.”

For this second one, generate Who, What, When, Where, Why, How questions.

Pg. 64

“Give yourself a hand. If you’ve got a presentation to give (without notes), try talking with your hands. People who gesticulated while explaining a math problem had better recall than those who didn’t in a study at the University of Chicago. Gesturing makes explaining easier, freeing your brain to tap your memory banks.”

“Women’s mental muscle. We may have the edge over men in memory matters, says Germany’s University of Dusseldorf. In its study,, 20- to 30-year old women did better on memory tests after a stressful event than men the same age. Scientists think the hormone estradiol protects the brain’s memory centers. “

4. All the information generated through brainstorming, question asking, researching sources -- co-mingles in working memory and you try and organize the material so that you can translate ideas into draft text.

As text gets produced it becomes part of the task environment because you are generating subsequent text based on what you’ve already generated.

As well, the text produced serves as the task environment for revising it, involving reading and editing.

As you read and edit, the text produced changes. This should influence further translating and the planning process. Hayes and Flower’s diagram suggests that Monitoring provides the communication among the elements.

The diagram doesn’t so nicely show the feedback to the translation and planning process.

5. Monitoring – is reflection on how you are doing in terms of meeting your goals – topic and rhetorical structure, e.g.,

getting your content structured in the best way, to fit the genre

achieving your communication goal with the specific audience

putting sentences and paragraphs together coherently

signaling the structure to the reader

6. Monitoring and organizing, or reorganizing, are closely related.

Organizing involves figuring out what you want to say and how to best organize your ideas to say this.

Takes into account the genre constraints you are trying to meet.

So the same ideas might be organized in temporal order if you were creating a narrative description.

Paper starts: When I write, the first thing I do is think of a topic; then I looked up articles on it in the library; then I pulled out several key ideas, etc.

Or in terms of claim – evidence relations if you were writing an argument.

Paper starts: The most difficult part of writing is revising the first draft.

So you translate, produce text, and monitor how well it is accomplishing your goals. If you detect that something is lacking or not working, you’d reorganize, maybe generate more content, perhaps change your goals, and translate the revised thinking.

E.g., When I tried to put down on paper what I thought was the strongest evidence I had for the effects of sunlight on mood, I realized that the experiment had a fatal flaw in it. I hadn’t realized that upon first reading the article. So I had to go back to square one and hunt up additional sources that might be stronger evidence.

Your text discusses formal and informal outlining for this. Also helpful are concept maps or free writes where you try to capture the essence of what you want to say and then how the pieces fit in. There is unfortunately, no magic formula here. Often the organization only emerges as you write – that is you don’t know the way to organize it “the best” until you try to fit pieces together.