ERIC Number: ED157039
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1978-Jun
Reference Count: 0
A Cognitive Science Approach to Writing. Technical Report No. 89.
Bruce, Bertram; And Others
This paper explores the process of writing from several perspectives, as a first step toward a more comprehensive theory. The first perspective sees writing as a communicative act. The observation that to write is to communicate, though commonplace, has major and sometimes surprising implications for a theory of writing. It forces a focus on the active role of the reader and leads to an emphasis on the audience in choosing tasks for beginning writers. The second perspective sees writing in the context of a taxonomy of communicative acts. Differences between writing and conversing, writing and lecturing, writing a play and writing a story have important theoretical and practical implications. The third perspective focuses on writing as a decomposable process whose product must still fulfill an overall communicative function. To this end, various subprocesses of writing are sequentially analysed, including discovering and manipulating ideas and generating text at different structural levels. (Author/AA)
Publication Type: Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Sponsor: National Inst. of Education (DHEW), Washington, DC.
Authoring Institution: Illinois Univ., Urbana. Center for the Study of Reading.; Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., Cambridge, MA.
Identifiers: Center for the Study of Reading (Illinois)