Veerle Baaijen

Keystroke Analysis: Reflections on Procedures and Measures

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

Discovery through Writing : Relationships with Writing Processes and Text Quality

ABSTRACT This study compares a problem-solving account of discovery through writing, which attributes discovery to strategic rhetorical planning and assumes discovery is associated with better quality text, to a dual-process account, which attributes discovery to the combined effect of 2 conflicting processes with opposing relationships to text quality. Low and high self-monitors were asked to write under 2 planning conditions. Keystroke-logging was used to assess the relationship of writing processes with discovery and text quality. The results support the dual-process account: Discovery was related to spontaneous sentence production and global revision of text, which had opposing relationships with text quality.

The Work of Writing: Raiding the Inarticulate

This article proposes that two processes are involved in the generation of content during writing: (a) an active, knowledge-constituting process in which content is synthesized by constraints within semantic memory representing the implicit structure of the writer’s understanding, and (b) a reflective, knowledge-transforming process in which content retrieved from episodic memory is manipulated in working memory to satisfy rhetorical goals. It suggests that, although both processes are required for effective writing, the contrasting nature of the implicit organization guiding the constitution of the writer’s understanding and the explicit organization required to satisfy rhetorical goals is the source of a fundamental conflict in writing. The article starts by relating the processes to current models of writing. It outlines how they are combined in a dual-process model and discusses evidence for the model. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for writing research and the teaching and development of writing.

Chapter 2.02.06: The Effects of Dyslexia on the Writing Processes of Students in Higher Education

Undergraduates with dyslexia typically report that writing is the activity that they find most problematic in their studies. Twenty-eight undergraduates registered as dyslexic at a university in the United Kingdom were compared with 32 undergraduates matched for age, gender and academic discipline. Tests of intelligence and of reading and spelling skills showed that the two groups were of equal intelligence but that the dyslexic students performed significantly worse on the reading and spelling tests and on a test of working memory span. Dyslexics made more spelling mistakes than non-dyslexics. Even after texts were corrected for spelling and capitalization, their texts were rated as of much lower quality by two independent judges. There were no differences in proportions of time which dyslexics and non-dyslexics spent on the different writing processes or in the effort they put into the processes. Keywords: dyslexia; dyslexic students; United Kingdom; writing processes