The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers: Sondra Perl
research addressed three major questions: (1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? and (3) What does an increased understanding of their processes suggest
about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in the schools?
Students were selected for the study on the basis of two criteria: writing samples that qualified them as unskilled writers and willingness to participate: what qualifies as unskilled?
Coding the Composing Process:
One of the goals of this research was to devise a tool for describing the movements that occur during composing
Means of viewing the composing:
(1) Standardized - it introduces a coding system for observing the composing process that can be replicated;
(2) Categorical - it labels specific, observable behaviors so that types of com- posing movements are revealed;
(3) Concise - it presents the entire sequence of composing movements on one or two pages;
(4) Structural - it provides a way of determining how parts of the process relate to the whole; and
(5) Diachronic - it presents the sequences of movements that occur during composing as they unfold in time
The Code:
each composing behavior exhibited by the student and charting each behavior on a continuum
The major categorical divisions in this coding system are talking, writing, and reading; however, it was clear that there are various kinds of talk and various kinds of writing and reading operations, and that a coding system would need to distinguish among these various types
thus far provides a way of analyzing the process that is categorical and capable of replication
The Continuum:
A ten-digit interval corresponds to 1 minute and keyed to a counter on a tape recorder. By listening to the tape and watching the counter, it is possible to determine the nature and duration on the tape, it is coded and then noted on the chart with the counter used as a time marker
The charts, or composing style sheets as they are called, do not explain what students wrote but rather how they wrote
Analyzing miscues:
Since students composed aloud two types of oral behaviors were available for study: encoding processes or wha students spoke while they were writing and decoding processes or what student "read" * after they had finished writing
When a discrepancy existed between encoding or decoding and what was on the paper, it was referred to as a miscue
Summary:
A major finding of this study is that all of the students studied displayed consistent composing processes; that is, the behavioral subsequences prewriting, writing, and editing appeared in sequential patterns that were recognizable across writing sessions and across students.
This consistency suggests a much greater internalization of process
Prewriting:
When not given specific prewriting instructions, the students in this study began writing within the first few minutes.
Sequence of planning and writing, clarifying and discarding, was repeated frequently in all of the sessions, even when students began writing with a secure sense of direction
Writing:
students wrote by shuttling from the sense of what they wanted to say forward to the words on the page and back from the words on the page to their intended meaning
although they produced inadequate or flawed products, they nevertheless seemed to understand and perform some of the crucial operations involved in composing with skill
Editing:
Editing played a major role in the composing processes of the students in this study
Despite students considered attempts to proofread, serious syntactic and stylistic problems in finished drafts: rule confusion, selective perception, egocentricity
Implications:
The results of this study suggest that teachers may first need to identify which characteristic components of each student's process facilitate writing and which inhibit it before further teaching takes place
The composing process is now amenable to a replicable and graphic mode of representation as a sequence of codable behavior
This study is an illustration of the way in which a theoretical model of the composing process can be grounded in observations of the individual's experience of composing
Teaching composing, then, means paying attention not only to the forms or products but also to the explicative process through which they arise