MATCHING THE WRITER'S WRITING FOR A READER AND READER'S SCHEMATA

Writing

▣ MATCHING THE WRITER'S WRITING FOR A READER AND READER'S SCHEMATA

■ The school environment is usually the first and most dominant situation in which young people are expected to partake in writing tasks, and students often perceive the teacher as their only reader audience. Developing a more expanded notion of the reader audience is part of becoming a "good communicator" in writing.

 

 

 

■ Being able to anticipate the readers' needs when they read the text we are creating is perhaps the essential characteristic of a successful writer. Novice writers find it challenging to go through this process of reader consideration since they have not, as yet, developed self-feedback techniques that can guide them. Even if they can quickly adapt to an interlocutor in a conversation where the listener's feedback is available, they may find the task of generating "imaginary reader feedback" almost impossible. That is why novice writers often have trouble deciding how much has to be said on a particular topic or issue and how to stay on the same subject without boring the reader. Experienced writers, on the other hand, are sensitive to the reader, as well as to background knowledge and potential content schemata, and thus can use elaboration skills to create a text that is comprehensible and communicative in nature.

 

 

 

■ From the student's point of view, writing is often based on the "teacher as the audience," resulting in students writing incoherent, telegraphic texts to show the teacher that they "know the stuff" without bothering to develop the topic properly. 

 

 

 

■ The expressivist approach views writing as an act that leads to and encourages "self-discovery" and is, therefore, crucial in the development of an educated person. Various leaders of this movement, particularly Elbow (1973, 1981a, 1981b), have emphasized fluency and power over the writing act as significant goals in the writing class. As a result, Elbow contributed significantly to instructional approaches encouraging writing activities such as personal journals and dialog journals both in English as a mother tongue and in other languages that adhere to Western writing conventions. 

 

 

 

■ On the other hand, the cognitivist approach places great importance on "writing as a problem-solving activity" and therefore emphasizes thinking and process in writing. A significant contribution to writing theory from this school of thought comes from Flower's work (Hayes and Flower, 1983; Flower, 1985; 1989). According to this approach, writing requires the ability to work with higher-order thinking skills. The writer makes plans, considers the context, chooses and generates alternatives, presents arguments - giving them the proper support - and arrives at a well-supported conclusion. This is part of the problem-solving process that is then translated into writing. Such a composing process is complex and very individual in nature. Rather than following a linear progression of development, this composing process reflects recursivity:

• We write the first version.
• We make changes.
• We rewrite and reformulate the whole passage.

Each new version is a more carefully thought-out presentation of the message (revision). The modifications require careful interaction between top-down and bottom-up productions of the written text (i.e., at the top-down level, it is the audience and the intent that are most important, while at the bottom-up level, attention needs to be given to language features and other conventions of the written text).