Writing

Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014).

An excellent practical guide to writing from a scientific perspective, justifying its recommendations with appeals to how people actually understand language.

Bryan Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).

The practical reference for anything usage-related.

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Proposes a continuum between “planners” and “discoverers”. Planners see writing as a way of expressing thoughts they already have fully formed; Discoverers use writing to figure out what they want to say. Planners don’t need many revisions and aren’t as picky about the medium, preferring whatever lets them get the thoughts out most efficiently, but discoverers often express personal preferences for particular methods—like handwriting—which bring them in closer contact with their writing and make it easier to look back through it all, pick out the message, and revise. Chandler spends a bunch of time talking about handwriting, word processors (of 1992 vintage), and the feelings inspired by each.

I think this continuum fits well with a point in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (see my review). He argued that the written word is invaluable because it enables analysis: with the pages in front of us, we can skip back and forth, dissecting a line of argument and examining it in our own time. Television, by contrast, flashes everything past in instants, making it cumbersome to go back and trace out the line of an argument.

A Discoverer, then, finds writing helpful precisely because it lays the thoughts out on paper, making them easy to understand and rearrange to produce the final product. A Planner, for whatever reason, doesn’t need this aid, and can build up and perfect a long line of argument mentally without ever putting a word down.

Most people fall somewhere in between, of course, but it is interesting to think of the style of writing as reflecting the use of tools to aid thinking, and the different thinking styles that implies in the writers.

Carter, M. (1990). The idea of expertise: An exploration of cognitive and social dimensions of writing. College Composition and Communication, 41(3), 265–286. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/357655

An argument that writing involves both general skills (mechanics, style, planning, etc.) and skills that depend heavily on the genre and audience of the writing, based on the community the writing serves. Teaching writing, then, cannot involve simply teaching grammar and “audience-less, purpose-less” writing, as we often see in high school English classes. It must also involve experience writing in a specific domain, learning the heuristics and techniques of the expert writers in that community.

Relies on the classic work on developing expert thinking (see Pedagogy), which showed that in problem-solving, experts do not apply general heuristics but have very specific, detailed knowledge of problems that allow them to solve them almost automatically. To become an expert, one must have sufficient experience with the field to develop this deep knowledge.

Cotos, E. (2023). Automated feedback on writing. In O. Kruse, C. Rapp, C. M. Anson, K. Benetos, E. Cotos, A. Devitt, & A. Shibani (Eds.), Digital writing technologies in higher education (pp. 374–364). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-36033-6_22

A review of Automated Writing Evaluation tools (AWE), which try to give formative feedback on student writing, rather than just scoring their essays to save humans the time and effort. There aren’t many such tools yet, so this mainly focuses on Criterion (lots of grammatical and usage suggestions) and Cotos’s Research Writing Tutor, which uses the IMRD move/step framework (see Rhetorical structure of writing).