Planning and production processes in the written language expression of skilled and less skilled writers

This thesis investigated the relationship between the way in which ideas are planned during the writing process and the way in which they are expressed in the final written product, and how this relationship varies across skill level and writing task.; Skilled and less skilled high school writers were asked to read a simple folk tale, retell it in writing, and write an evaluation of the story. A detailed record of the location and duration of all pauses or "planning times" was kept by having students write over a computer graphics tablet.; To formulate specific hypotheses, a process model for writing-after-reading was developed. According to the model, the same planning subprocesses (generating and organizing) are used throughout the writing process to create and then transform units that are either collections of propositions (ideas) or elaborations of parts of a single proposition. Each "planning unit" consists of an organizational frame and its content.; Writers create a mental representation of the text to be written by generating ideas from knowledge structures in memory (a text-based propositional structure, a situation model, and other nontext-based structures). They organize these propositions in coherent clusters within a larger text frame. At any point, simple or complex propositions from this text frame may be translated into their final written form by applying the generating and organizing processes to a succession of smaller and smaller planning units.; A series of repeated measures analyses of variance, using planning time as the dependent variable, led to the following major findings. (1) In general, the structure of planning processes as outlined in the model was supported. (2) The writers generated ideas from three types of knowledge structures in memory, and (3) used the following planning units: complex propositions (sentences in the final product), simple propositions (clauses), phonological phrases (noun, verb, and prepositional phrases), and words. (4) Although the less skilled writers used the same basic planning processes as the skilled writers, the skilled writers were more efficient planners. (5) Writing task affected planning by causing a change in the relative distribution of planning time at unit boundaries.