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There is widespread belief among students that high score essays stem from having the right topic content, faultless grammar, and impressive vocabulary. Far less appreciated is the role of attitudinal approach to writing tasks and cognitive composing strategies.This paper will use findings from a process-oriented study of a group of university student writers to show that success in argumentative writing owes much to an awareness of high-level rhetorical goals and attention to the context of situation, which includes reader expectations and academic genre conventions. Using a multi-pronged research design which included videotaping of pen movements, interviews, and product analysis, I examined the students' decision-making behaviours during extended pauses (longer than 15 seconds). The cognitive behaviours of moderately competent writers in the group were compared with those who had earlier been identified as basic writers. The former were found to employ discourse-level planning strategies more frequently, as apposed to sentence/word-level planning which was the mainstay of basic writers. Moderately competent writers were also more likely, when deciding content selection and organisation, to be influenced by rhetorical considerations such as anticipated reader response and circumstances in the writing situation.
Proceeding from these findings, the paper will argue for an approach to teaching academic writing skills that seeks to heighten student awareness of the rhetorical problem contained in a writing assignment, and promote consciousness of whole-text goals, so that student writers can use these goals to guide their decision-making.
This paper will use findings from a process-oriented study of a group of university student writers to show that success in argumentative writing owes much to an awareness of high-level rhetorical goals and attention to the context of situation, which includes reader expectations and academic genre conventions. The relation between successful writing and rhetorical goals awareness has implications for academic writing skills development, implications the final part of this paper will explore.
A brief account of the aims and methodology is necessary before the results are reported. The main aim of the study was to investigate student writers' decision-making behaviours during pauses in the course of writing, to discover what decisions are made, and how they are made. One of the questions the investigation sought to answer was: what factors influence the decision-making procedures of better writers but do not figure prominently in the decision-making of less competent writers.
Using a multi-pronged research design which included the videotaping of pen movements during writing, post-hoc interviews, and written product analysis, I assembled composing protocols for each of the subjects participating in the study. A subject's composing protocol was a detailed time-ordered record of the subject's overt behaviours and inferred cognitive behaviours as he/she generated a text. The protocols were studied to determine the content and strategies of a subject's decision-making during pauses longer than 15 seconds.
Content of decisions was categorised according to the cognitive operation which, from converging lines of evidence, the subject appeared to be performing during a pause, eg. planning support, reviewing grammatical choice, planning organisation, etc. Strategy of decision-making was categorised according to the level of focal concern and the considerations that influenced a decision. For example, a student may arrive at a decision on the topical content of the next paragraph by using the last written sentence as a trigger, in which case the student's level of focal concern is local and the decision is influenced entirely by the topic content words in the preceding sentence. On the other hand, another student may make the same decision by directing attention to the macro-structure of the essay's argument and the functional role of the paragraph in that argument, in which case the level of focal concern is global and the decision is influenced by the writer's whole-text rhetorical goal.
The cognitive behaviours of six subjects, identified through three composition tasks as moderately competent writers, were compared with the behaviours of six basic writers in the group. The criteria used for identifying moderately competent writers and basic writers were not related solely to facility in writing comprehensible sentences and paragraphs free of grammatical error, but to text generation skills necessary for written academic discourse, skills such as maintaining focus on a topic idea or thesis through appropriate selection and organisation of meaning, recognising claims that need to be supported and providing adequate support, and stating relations between part and whole. Basic writers were the subjects whose compositions, compared to those of the rest of the group, were so poorly organised and developed as to interfere with a reader's process of accessing the holistic message. Moderately competent writers were those whose compositions displayed some of the traits of adequately developed, focused academic writing; they were the best writers in the group since all the subjects in the study came from a composition class for students with problems in written communication.
The results consistently indicate that moderately competent writers direct more attention to discourse-level and rhetorical considerations in their composing decisions in both planning and revising. Compared to basic writers, the moderately competent are more aware of the larger rhetorical problem as they write and are tend to be less confined to the local concern of generating the next word or sentence. As Table 1 shows, when planning main ideas, support ideas, and organisation, the moderately competent writers in the study more frequently employed rhetorical strategies; their planning decisions were more often influenced by rhetorical parameters such as anticipated reader response and the aim of the discourse.
| Type of planning | Rhetorical strategy | |
| Mod Competent (% of decisions) |
Basic Writer (% of decisions) | |
| Main idea *f = 69 in MCW group, 33 in BW group |
33.3 | 3.1 |
| Support f = 49 in MCW group, 39 in BW group |
24.5 | 7.7 |
| Organisation f = 18 in MCW group, 8 in BW group |
44.4 | 12.5 |
| *f refers to the total number of observed planning decisions in the category for each group. | ||
Similar results were obtained for revising decisions (see Table 2). There was a much higher incidence of rhetorical strategies among moderately competent writers when deciding text-level changes (ie. revising organisation and development at paragraph or whole text level) and making changes to meaning at sentence level.
| Type of revision | Rhetorical strategy | |
| Mod Competent (% of decisions) |
Basic Writer (% of decisions) | |
| Meaning changes *f = 50 in MCW group, 26 in BW group |
36.0 | 11.5 |
| Text-level changes f = 32 in MCW group, 12 in BW group |
71.9 | 8.3 |
| *f refers to total number of decisions in the type of revision for each group. | ||
To discover what cognitive writing behaviours are most responsible for the difference between moderately competent writers and basic writers, a statistical procedure called MANOVA (Multivariate analysis of variance) was run on five extended pause behaviours, viz:
| Composing Behaviour | Univariate F | p < |
| Planning main idea | 7.24 | .05 |
| Discourse-level planning | 13.26 | .01 |
| Meaning/discourse revision | 5.96 | .05 |
| Use of rhetorical strategies | 29.38 | .001 |
| Global-level focus | 24.23 | .001 |
The question of how to raise rhetorical awareness can only be answered in this paper with general guidelines as space does not permit a description of specific pedagogical techniques. The first suggested guideline is the teaching of task analysis skills with the aim of equipping students with strategies for discovering reader expectations and their role as writer. In task analysis students learn to ask themselves probing questions about the stated and implied requirements underlying the words in the assignment instructions. Task analysis has to be both content-related (ie. identify the argument acts expected in content knowledge terms) and content-free (ie. identify the argument and discourse functions expected without or with minimal reference to content knowledge). A content-free analysis of the instruction "compare", for instance, would lead students to note that comparing requires the performance of two discourse acts: specifying the aspects of the theories or situations to be compared, and establishing the criteria to be used. Content-free analysis of task instructions relieves the student of the burden of content knowledge so that what to say does not engross the student to the extent that they lose sight of what the assignment wants students to do.
The second general guideline is to urge student writers to form a conscious intent to communicate an attitudinal position in response to the assignment topic or question. There has to be an intention to communicate a felt message before a writer can begin to think about reader needs and expectations. For many students arriving at a holistic felt message (thesis) is a problem. The writing teacher has to demonstrate heuristics that student writers can use to explore their own experience and thoughts including their reaction to their reading, to bring to awareness their stance on the topic, and to decide on the persona they intend to adopt in the writing. In short, students need lessons in defining to themselves what is referred to as ethos in traditional rhetoric.
The third guideline for rhetorical consciousness raising is to help students develop reader awareness and train them to use such awareness to make decisions that contribute to coherent, well-argued written discourse. Reader awareness (pathos in traditional rhetoric) empowers student writers to break away from an egocentric mental set during writing and avoid being "deceived by egocentricity" (Moffet, 1968:202). Egocentricity is a contributory cause of what Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) describe as the "knowledge-telling" approach to writing. A knowledge-telling mind set coupled with insensitivity to the reader's perspective result in essays that are full of disparate pieces of information but contain no unified overall argument.
A sense of audience can be developed through classroom activities requiring students to anticipate reader response to planned moves or content, or to predict a reader's needs at particular points in a text (eg. after stating an opinion, at the beginning of a paragraph). Reader awareness as a writing strategy is the means to a more thorough thinking through of hazily conceived ideas at all levels of planning: whole-text, paragraph and sentence. At the whole-text level, for example, anticipated reader questions (eg. What precisely do you mean? Why are you telling me this? How does it support your thesis?) leads to tighter organisation and a more thoughtfully defined thesis, while at the paragraph level anticipation of reader queries (What evidence is there? How is idea X connected to idea Y?) alerts the student writer to flaws common in novice academic writing: lack of substantiation, unexplained topic shifts, and gaps in coherence.
The fourth guideline is to provide training in metacognition with the objective of creating in student writers an awareness of how they make decisions, so that they can examine their own cognitive composing processes to determine whether rhetorical considerations enter into their selection of meaning, argument moves and language. The training is best given in the form of small group activity which has students describe to each other the thinking (goals, possibilities and uncertainties) that preceded their composing decisions in a recent piece of writing (eg. whether to say X or Y, whether to include or omit certain information). This sharing is beneficial in two ways. First, it enables students to monitor each other's use of rhetorical goals in decision making, thereby heightening awareness of the significance of audience and purpose in writing. Secondly, having to explain to peer writers the reason for a content or linguistic choice compels students to verbalise their composing behaviours, and so make these behaviours accessible to modification. A metacognitive facility empowers students to look critically at their composing strategies and replace ineffective habitual strategies with more effective ones.
Chandrasegaran, A. (1991). The Composing Processes of University Student Writers. PhD thesis. National University of Singapore.
Miller, S. (1980). Rhetorical maturity: Definition and development. In A. Freedman and I. Pringle (Eds), Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition. Ontario: The Canadian Council of Teachers of English.
Moffet, J. (1968). Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Peters, P. (1986). Getting the theme across: A study of dominant function in the academic writing of university students. In B. Couture (Ed), Functional Approaches to Writing: Research Perspectives. London: Frances Pinter.
Winterowd, W. R. with Jack Blum (1994). A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English.
| Please cite as: Chandrasegaran, A. (1996). Awareness of rhetorical goals and academic writing competence. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/chandrasegaran.html |