Prewriting and Drafting Strategies of Graduate Students In Writing Term Papers in English

<p>Researches on writing have found that some writers are successful while others are not. Studies that focus on the texts students produced were unable to reveal the reasons for the phenomenon. Researches on the process of writing attempt to uncover the mental processes that students experience while writing texts. Findings by researchers on mental processes predict that more successful writers employ a battery of effective strategies while writing and they employ a more recursive steps in producing the texts. The present study is an attempt to uncover the mental processes of two graduate students when they were writing papers as a form of academic assignment. The research employed descriptive qualitative design. The data were collected using think-aloud protocol in which the subjects think aloud what came to their mind during the production of the papers and it was tape-recorded. The recorded think-aloud was then transcribed and analysed by categorizing the utterances into cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and by depicting the utterances into a chart that depicted the subjects’ flow of thought during prewriting and drafting stages. The data were collected from 22 and 24 sittings of writing the papers. The result of data analyses shows that: (1) the subjects employ both cognitive and metacognitive strategies when writing, (2) the subjects create mental outline in the prewriting stage and keep on revising it during the drafting stage, and (3) recursiveness is not a mark of successful writers.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong><em>drafting, papers, prewriting, strategy<strong></strong></em></p>

Computationally Assessing Expert Judgments of Freewriting Quality

This study examines the relationship between the linguistic features of freewrites and human assessments of freewrite quality. Freewriting is a prewriting strategy that has received little experimental attention, particularly in terms of linguistic differences between high and low quality freewrites. This study builds upon the authors’ previous study, in which linguistic features of freewrites written by 9th and 11th grade students were included in a model of the freewrites’ quality (Weston, Crossley, & McNamara; 2010). The current study reexamines this model using a larger data set of freewrites. The results show that similar linguistic features reported in the Weston et al. model positively correlate with expert ratings in the new data set. Significant predictors in the current model of freewrite quality were total number of words and stem overlap. In addition, analyses suggest that 11th graders, as compared to 9th graders, wrote higher quality and longer freewrites. Overall, the results of this study support the conclusion that better freewrites are longer and more cohesive than poor freewrites.