H. van den Bergh

How do secondary school students write poetry? How creative writing processes relate to final products

Do different creative writing processes lead to qualitatively different writing products? In this study we examined how Dutch speaking secondary school students (16-years old, 11 grade) wrote two poems. Students’ on line writing processes were recorded by a keystroke logging program: Inputlog. Text production, pausing, and several types of revision activities were coded. Each poem was holistically rated for quality by seven judges. Next, we examined the relationship between students’ writing processes and the quality of their final text. We found that relatively much text production in the beginning of the writing process and relatively many high level revisions towards the end of the writing process, influenced the final text positively. Pausing and other types of revision were negatively related to the text quality, at least in some of the phases of the writing process.