Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1983, 57,963-978. @ Perceptual and Motor Skills 1983 INTERRUPTING VISUAL. FEEDBACK IN WRITING GLYNDA A. HULL1 AND WILLIAM L. SMITH University of Pittsburgh Summary.-To test the effects of interrupting visual feedback on writing, two groups of subjects-9 experienced and 9 inexperienced writers-were pre- vented from re-reading as they produced written texts. Their texts were then analyzed for error, syntax, over-all quality, and sentence connectedness. While both groups of writers were able to produce relatively well-formed sentences when they could not re-read, both were nonetheless hindered at the level of discourse production. Each group, however, reacted to that hinderance with different linguistic strategies. In recent years it has become commonplace to talk about the recursive nature of the writing or composing process. Using case study evidence, Per1 ( 1979) characterized composing as a kind of "retrospective structuring." On the basis of their protocol research, Flower and Hayes (1980) have suggested that composing consists of three major processes-planning, translating, and reviewing-which can occur recursively. Sommers (1978) concluded, also - from case studies, that revision is a recursive process which occurs throughout composing. Researchers have noted that composing does not occur in a simple linear progression. Rather, movement forward, whether to continue text pro- duction or to edit or plan, occurs in conjunction with movement backwards, to read what one has written, and to reflect upon one's text. If composing is a recursive activity, it seems reasonable to expect behavioral evidence of that recursion, such as re-reading one's text. And in fact, researchers have singled out particular behaviors of good writers which imply recursive activity. Stallard (1974) noted that the "good" student writers in his study stopped to re-read their texts more frequently than did the "average" student writers. Similarly, Pianko ( 1979) found that her "traditional" college writers re-scanned three times more often than her remedial group and concluded that the reflective activity implied by such re-scanning is the parameter which separates good and poor writers. Re-reading or re-scanning (a term usually synonymous with re-reading part of one's text) has been viewed both as evi- dence of the recursive nature of the writing process and as a characteristic behavior of "good" writers. Apart from this correlational evidence that good writers re-scan more, 'We thank Leonard Epstein for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper and for suggesting our "invisible i n k methodology. We also thank Deborah Arnowia and Constance Wanner Ruzidr for their help with data analysis. W e particularly appreciate - -- Mrs. Ruzick's Tnsight and assistance in &vising a methodology for &dying sentence con- nectedness. Address all correspondence to Glynda A. Hull, Learning Research and Development Center 606, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Transcript
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1983, 57,963-978. @ Perceptual and Motor Skills 1983
INTERRUPTING VISUAL. FEEDBACK I N WRITING
GLYNDA A. HULL1 AND WILLIAM L. SMITH
University of Pittsburgh
Summary.-To test the effects of interrupting visual feedback on writing, two groups of subjects-9 experienced and 9 inexperienced writers-were pre- vented from re-reading as they produced written texts. Their texts were then analyzed for error, syntax, over-all quality, and sentence connectedness. While both groups of writers were able to produce relatively well-formed sentences when they could not re-read, both were nonetheless hindered at the level of discourse production. Each group, however, reacted to that hinderance with different linguistic strategies.
In recent years it has become commonplace to talk about the recursive nature of the writing or composing process. Using case study evidence, Per1 ( 1979) characterized composing as a kind of "retrospective structuring." On the basis of their protocol research, Flower and Hayes (1980) have suggested that composing consists of three major processes-planning, translating, and reviewing-which can occur recursively. Sommers (1978) concluded, also - from case studies, that revision is a recursive process which occurs throughout composing. Researchers have noted that composing does not occur in a simple linear progression. Rather, movement forward, whether to continue text pro- duction or to edit or plan, occurs in conjunction with movement backwards, to read what one has written, and to reflect upon one's text.
If composing is a recursive activity, it seems reasonable to expect behavioral evidence of that recursion, such as re-reading one's text. And in fact, researchers have singled out particular behaviors of good writers which imply recursive activity. Stallard (1974) noted that the "good" student writers in his study stopped to re-read their texts more frequently than did the "average" student writers. Similarly, Pianko ( 1979) found that her "traditional" college writers re-scanned three times more often than her remedial group and concluded that the reflective activity implied by such re-scanning is the parameter which separates good and poor writers. Re-reading or re-scanning ( a term usually synonymous with re-reading part of one's text) has been viewed both as evi- dence of the recursive nature of the writing process and as a characteristic behavior of "good" writers.
Apart from this correlational evidence that good writers re-scan more,
'We thank Leonard Epstein for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper and for suggesting our "invisible i n k methodology. W e also thank Deborah Arnowia and Constance Wanner Ruzidr for their help with data analysis. We particularly appreciate - - - Mrs. Ruzick's Tnsight and assistance in &vising a methodology for &dying sentence con- nectedness. Address all correspondence to Glynda A. Hull, Learning Research and Development Center 606, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
964 G. A. HULL 8r W. L. SMITH
there have been several attempts to test the importance of re-scanning experi- mentally, by interrupting visual feedback; that is, researchers have taken away writers' visual access to the texts that they write. Gould ( 1980) tested the im- portance of being able to re-scan when composing business letters by having experienced adult writers compose with a wooden stylus on top of carbon paper, which prevented their re-reading. He found no differences in quality, amount of time spent composing, or the number of proofreading changes be- tween this "invisible" writing and either dictating or normal composing. His findings, however, may be limited by the genre he chose. The possibility that the business letter represents a common discourse schema which most writers would have already internalized may explain why there were no significant dif- ferences berween invisible writing and normal composing.
Arwell (1981) asked college students-remedial writers and average writers-to compose for 10 min. in each of two conditions, normal writing with pen and paper and "blind" writing with worn-out ball point pens on top of carbon paper. Analyzing discourse by means of propositional analysis, At- well determined chat preventing visual feedback affected coherence, particularly in the papers by remedial writers. However, because her subjects produced only partial or very limited texts, her findings do not show the effects of such a task on the production of a whole text.
There has been one attempt to investigate the role of recursion experi- mentally in children's writing. Teleman (1981) asked 12- to 13-yr.-old Swedish schoolchildren to listen to a short fable and then re-tell it in writing, one group using visible ink and the other, invisible. H e found it impossible to distinguish one text from another, although texts and sentences were slightly shorter in invisible ink. As Teleman points out, these results must be interpreted in light of the fact that the children were provided both content and organiza- tion of text. This condition would, of course, decrease reliance on prior text and thereby fail to provide an adequate test of the recursive activity which might ,occur in a more complex writing task.
Based on the idea of recursiveness in writing, one would expect situations which interrupt visual feedback to interfere greatly with composing, and writers who are more dependent on negative feedback, what Sommers and others have called dissonance, to experience greater disruption than writers who rely less on recursion. It might further be expected, using the conclusions drawn by Stallard and Pianko, that better (or more experienced) writers would depend more upon visual feedback or make better use of it than poorer (or less experi- enced) writers. In fact, it is often claimed that poorer writers compose in a linear fashion, which suggests that they do not take advantage of the feedback available through re-scanning.
The purpose of the present research was to determine how intermpting
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visual feedback-by taking away visual access to what has been written-affected the composition of whole texts by experienced, good writers and inexperienced, poorer writers. W e wanted to determine the effects of interrupting feedback on both the sentence and on discourse.
Sab jecu
Eighteen subjects participated in this study (two of the original 20 did not complete all of the writing tasks). Nine of the subjects were inexperienced, poorer writers who had been required to enroll in Basic Writing, a course de- signed for students who score below a specified level on a writing sample but are not judged to be extremely deficient in writing skills. These students are not, then, equivalent to the basic writers described by Shaughnessy (1977). The nine experienced, good writers were teaching assistants who were expected to write frequently and well as a part of their graduate studies.
This experiment was designed to compare writing in invisible ink and regular ink for the two groups of writers. The design provided for comparison both across types of writers (experienced, inexperienced) and within this writer-classification (visible, invisible ink). The ideal design for the study would be to counterbalance the order of presentation of essay, with half pre- sented invisible ink first, and the other half, regular ink. However, because the size of the sample was small, we felt it was impossible to control practice effects by counterbalancing order. Consequently, we presented the invisible ink second to minimize possible differences.
For each of the two writing tasks, the basic writers wrote at the same time in a large conference room; the graduate students wrote on a different day. W e gave subjects an hour to write their responses to the assigned topics, and there was approximately a 1-wk. interval berween tasks. So that there would be as little difference between the two writings as we could arrange, for both tasks we supplied the students with fountain pens and with lined paper which had been numbered on every other line. W e instructed them, under both conditions, to write only on the numbered lines and only with the pens we had given them. For the first essay, the fountain pens were filled with standard blue ink. For the second, to prevent students from seeing what they had writ- ten, we filled the pens with invisible ink, a clear, colorless fluid which appears only after the paper has been held close to a heat source, such as a candle or the burner of a stove. Before the invisible ink task, we explained to the subjects that they would not be able to see what they had written, and we instructed them to use the numbered lines to help them keep their place on the page.
966 G. A. HULL & W. L. SMITH
The topics used in this experiment were designed to elicit persuasive essays, essays in which a writer argues in support of a position. Research by San Jose ( 1772), Perron (1976), and Crowhura (1780) has indicated that this purpose in writing elicits the most syntactically complex prose and, we hypothesized, should require more feedback from what has been written. Con- comitantly, preventing access to one's text might alter that complexity. Further- more, the persuasive purpose requires the conceptualization and sequencing of ideas, but the ideas and their order are not pre-organized, as is often the case with either narrative or descriptive writing. Finally, the persuasive pur- pose ought to require either extensive planning or extensive re-reading since the ideas one presents must lead to a conclusion based on those ideas. Or, in the case of an essay which moves from generalization to supporting evidence (the pattern implied by the topics we chose), the persuasive purpose requires a writer to refer to the generalization and the previously written text to main- tain logic and coherence.
Since we could not use the same assignment for both tasks (students would remember too much from the first essay when they wrote the second one only a week later), we chose current events topics, assuming that the subjects would have knowledge of both:
Topic 1 (used for "visible writing") For some time now there has been a conuoversy over whether the United States
should compete in the 1980 Summer Olympics to be held in Moscow. Some people feel that because Russia has invaded Afghanistan, American athletes should boycott the games. Others, though, feel that politics should not enter the Olympics and that Ameri- can athletes should be allowed to participate.
Write an essay in which you take a stand on the controversy and argue your posi- tion.
Topic 2 (used for "invisible writing") Recently the issue of draft registration for women has received a great deal of
attention. Some people feel thac women should have to serve in the armed forces, while others believe they should be exempt from service.
Write an essay in which you take a stand on this issue and argue your position.
W e pretested these topics before the experiment and found no differences in the resulting essays that could be attributed to a topic variable.
Sentence-level Analyses
Syntax and fluency.-We analyzed each essay using the standard, global measures of syntactic complexity, words per T-unit ( a main clause plus any subordinate clauses) and words per clause. W e selected these metrics because the existing research indicates that better persuasive writing typically has greater T-unit and clause lengths, and also because both measures have been shown to distinguish groups of writers who are several grades apart. W e
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expected, then, that constraining visual feedback might cause writers to reduce words per T-unit, words per clause, and number of words.
Clause placement, type, and freqaency.-Assuming that feedback inter- ruption would have the greatest impact on the embedding of less-than-clausal elements, we hypothesized that subjects might use more right-branching full clauses when denied access to visual feedback. W e analyzed the types and placement of clauses and the frequencies of each placement and type. These clauses were classified as adverbials, relatives, or factives (including That-S, Fact that, and That-S W H ) . Adverbials were further categorized according to position within the sentence: initial, preceding the subject; final, following the verb; or medial, following the subject but preceding the verb. W e classified relative clauses according to two post-nominal positions, pre-verb and post-verb. Factives were sub-divided according to "functional" position: use as the subject or object, i.e., pre-verb or post-verb.
Error analysis.-We developed a taxonomy of all potential sentence level errors that writers might make. This taxonomy was based on type of error rather than cause of error, the kind of taxonomy proposed by Shaughnessy (1977), because it seems impossible in many cases to determine reliably why a writer makes an error-whether the mistake is a slip of the pen or whether it indicates lack of knowledge about writing conventions. Also, the experi- mental condition of composing without being able to see what has been written would further confound efforts to identify causation. Indeed, we intended to utilize change in type of error or frequency as one broad index of the effect of disrupting feedback, for one function of re-scanning might be to correct slips of the pen.
Our error taxonomy included several general categories: spelling, punctua- tion, syntax (these categories were further sub-divided into particular types), omissions/additions, and word-order mistakes. W e also had categories for errors in verb and pronoun usage, and mistakes in what we called "concatena- tion" rules, failure to follow a lexical pattern established earlier in a sentence.
T o control the amount of writing each subject produced, we calculated errors per various denominators. Since spelling errors occur on the lexical level, we calculated them per number of words written. Because punctuation and pro- noun mistakes, syntactic garbles, and incidences of omitced/added words occur on the sentence level, we calculated these errors per T-unit. Because verb errors and mistakes in concatenation occur on the clausal level, we calculated these per clause.
Over-all Quality Analysis
The best available technique for determining the over-all quality of essays is the holistic rating, for it does not isolate certain elements such as conformity to editing conventions, but rather, views a whole as more than the sum of the
968 G. A. HULL & W. L. SMITH
parts (Cooper, 1977). In a typical holistic scoring session, raters read a set of essays and assign each paper a score (ranging, for example, from a "1" for poorest quality to a "4" for highest quality) based on their general impression of the paper. In the present study, four raters were selected from a pool of college teachers who had regularly rated freshmen essays using the holistic scoring procedure, and had already been trained using the procedure. By selecting raters who already were trained, we hoped to control for any in- advertent bias from their being trained by the researchers, a confounding vari- able documented by Freedman (1981).
Each of the four raters received a packet containing the essay topics and all 36 essays, each of which had been typed and from which the author's name had been removed. Raters did not know who had written the papers or that some had been written in invisible ink. Raters were instructed to divide the 36 papers into four stacks of nine papers each, according to quality: the 9 papers which were best in over-all quality, the 9 which were second best, the 9 which were third best, and the 9 which were poorest. W e selected this "forced choice" method of scoring because it would increase the possibility of distinguishing within groups and between tasks. Had all essays been rated without forced choice, we suspected that both essays written by the graduate students might have received the highest rating; it would have been hypothet- ically possible for the 18 graduate student papers to have been rated "best" and the 18 basic writer papers rated "worst." Our forced-choice method avoided this problem.
To tabulate the ratings, we awarded a score of 4 to those papers a rater considered best in over-all quality, a score of 3 to those rated second best, a score of 2 to those rated third best, and a score of 1 to those rated poorest in over-all quality. The ratings each essay received from the four raters were then summed, providing a 4 to 16 scale.
Sentence Connectedness Since it has been suggested chat writers re-read what they have written to
make connections between what has been written and what they are about to write, we included among our analyses a measure of sentence connectedness. But instead of measuring connectedness through conventional methods of counting and categorizing what Halliday and Hasan (1976) have called "co- hesive ties" (or the referents such as repeated words which link a sentence to what has come before i t ) , we followed McCutchen and Perfetti (1982) in tak- ing from the literature on speech comprehension a concept called the "given- new contract" and applying that concept to connectedness in writing. [See Witte and Faigley (1981), for a review of the problems associated with the use of Halliday and Hasan's taxonomy.]
Clark and Haviland (1977) have described how a speaker, in constructing
VISUAL FEEDBACK IN WRITING 969
a sentence, conveys two kinds of information: the given, or that which he be- lieves his listener alceady knows, and the new, or that which he believes his listener doesn't know. Clark and Haviland have also explained how a listener uses the given-new strategy to comprehend what he hears. Vande Kopple ( 1982) demonstrated that paragraphs which facilitate the given-new strategy are easier to understand and remember than are paragraphs which frustrate the strategy, and so extended application to larger units of discourse. Odoroff (1952) first suggested that the principle of given-new might prove a good means of measuring cohesion in a written text, and McCutchen and Perfetti (1982) devised a method for analyzing the co~ectedness of children's writing via the given-new contract. Our own methodology is an adaptation of Mc- Cutchen and Perfetti's.
W e analyzed connectedness by means of the given-new contract first by dividing each text into T-units ( a main clause plus any subordinate clauses) and then each T-unit into given-new segments. W e then analyzed each given seg- ment to determine whether its connection to a previous T-unit was local (that is, it referred to the immediately preceding T-unit) or remote (that is, it re- ferred to a previous T-unit other than the one immediately preceding). Al- though we did not count and label cohesive ties in the manner of Halliday and Hasan--our intent was to find a more global and less tedious method for noting sentence c o n n e c t i o s t h e given segments always contain at least one of Halli- day and Hasan's "cohesive ties."
The following excerpt from an essay written by a graduate student ( in regular ink) illustrates our coding procedure. The double slash marks indicate the end of a T-unit; the solid underlining, given information; and the broken underlining, new information. Local and remote ties are shown by the super- scripts L and R, respectively. I t will be apparent from this excerpt that given information often corresponds to the simple subject of a sentence and new information to the complete predicate, though, we should note, this is not always the case.
1 A recent Doonesbury comic strip depicted a conversation between an American
L and a Russian.// 2 These two men, who were presumably lower echelon diplomats, - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L were discussing the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.// 3 The American questioned the - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L Russian as to the USSR's motives for this action.// 4 The Russian, hesitant to speak, fearing that he might be overheard, whispered to the American that he would tell him - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - the reason if the American promised "not to tell anyone."// 5 When the American - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L readily agreed to this condition, the Russian then leaned over and said in a low voice, - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
970 G. A. HULL & W. L. SMITH
R "We want to rule the world."// 6 Gary Trudeau's tongue in cheek treatment of the - - - - - - - Soviet's imperialistic tendencies reflects an anxiety many Americans, including myself, - - - - - - have about the Russians.// - - - - - -
The first T-unit in the text is considered new, since nothing precedes it. In T-unit 2, the phrase "these two men" represents given information, for it refers to "an American and a Russian" in the immediately preceding T-unit. Because "these two men" refers to a prior adjacent sentence, we consider this tie "local." In T-unit 3, "The American" connects both to "These two men" in T-unit 2 and "an American" in T-unit 1. However, we consider it a local tie because it does connect to an adjacent sentence. T-unit 5 illustrates how we segment T-units beginning with adverbial clauses. If an initial clause can be moved to another part of the sentence, we consider that clause new, and look for given information in the main clause which then begins the sentence. (An exception is "if, then" clauses, where the "if" clause obviously contains given information.) In T-unit 6, the given information refers, not to the preceding adjacent T-unit, but to "A recent Doonesbury comic strip depicted" from T-unit 1, or perhaps, to the entire example as developed by all the preceding T-units. W e label it a remote tie.
Statistical Analysis
In all cases, we tested for statistical significance by means of a two-way analysis of variance, repeated measures on one factor, with level of experience as the between-groups factor and type of ink the within-group factor. W e used P.05 as the criterion level for significant differences. Means and standard devia- tions or standard errors are also presented.
RESULTS Fluency
The results of the analysis for fluency showed that both basic writers and graduate students wrote fewer words in the invisible ink task. Graduate students averaged 518.11 words in regular ink and 457.78 in invisible ink; basic writers averaged 249.56 words in regular ink, 238.78 in invisible. However, these decreases were nonsignificant. Disrupting visual feedback does not seem to influence fluency. Graduate students did write significantly more words under both conditions than did basic writers ( p < .001).
Syntax The global syntactic analyses indicated a significant difference between
essays written under normal conditions and those written when feedback was disrupted in number of words per clause: both basic writers and graduate students significantly decreased words per clause when feedback was disrupted ( p < .001). Words per T-unit was not changed significantly in either group;
VISUAL FEEDBACK IN WRITING 97 1
however, graduate students wrote longer T-units under both conditions ( 9 < .025 ) . Means and standard errors ate present in Fig. 1.
FIG. 1. Mean words per T-unit and words per clause for each group on each task with standard error
Our analyses of types, placement and frequency of clauses showed no sig- nificant differences between the two writing tasks for either group. (See Table 1.) Seventy-five percent of all clauses used by graduate students were post-verb for the tasks under normal conditions, as were 76% when feedback was disrupted. For basic writers, 72% of all clauses were post-verb on the normal task, and 73% when feedback was disrupted.
TABLE 1
Group Adjective Adverb Factive All Clauses Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final Initial Final
The analyses of error per various denominators showed that neither grad- uate students nor basic writers altered their error rate or error type when feed- back was disrupted. W e also calculated the ratios of total errors per word and total errors per T-unit, and there was no significant difference between the tasks for either group on either measure. Graduate students made fewer errors whether they wrote in visible or invisible ink. Means and standard deviations for the error categories are presented in Table 2. Some categories have been merged because either no errors occurred in a category or the number of sub- jects who made the error was too small (often, just one) to be insightful.
TABLE 2 MEAN ERROR PROPORTTONS FOR EACH GROUP ON EACH TASK
Group Spelling Punctua- Verb plus Others All error All error ~ e r tion concate- oer oer Der
dord Per nation T->nit Gord ~ I u n i t M SD T-unit Per clause M SD
Note.-The "others" category is composed of errors in pronoun, syntax, word order, and ornitted/added words.
Quality
The results of the holistic scoring showed consistent patterns of decrease in quality from normal conditions to disruptive feedback for both groups ( P < .05). Under normal conditions, graduate students wrote papers judged better than those by basic writers, as were their papers when feedback was disrupted ( p < .001). The means and standard errors for the ratings of quality are presented in Fig. 2. This figure not only shows the difference between the groups, but more importantly, shows the parallel decline between tasks for both groups.
Sentence Connectedness
When writing in invisible ink, both inexperienced and experienced writers produced significantly different percentages of local ties ( p < .01) and remote ties ( p < .025) compared to those in their productions of visible ink. How- ever, the percentages changed in opposite directions for the groups; that is, while experienced writers used a greater percentage of local ties in regular ink and fewer in invisible ink, inexperienced writers did the opposite, using a
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lesser percentage of local ties in visible ink and a greater percentage in invisible. The pattern was reversed for remote ties. Here graduate students significantly increased their percentage in invisible ink, while basic writers decreased their percentage. These interactions are presented in Fig. 3, along with standard errors.
f X P f R I f N C f D WRITERS
FIG. 2. Mean quality rating for each group on each task, with standard error
INK INK--
Drscussro~ W e predicted that interrupting feedback would interfere with composing,
and we can infer that it did interfere: for both groups of subjects, essays written in invisible ink had shorter clause lengths, were of lower over-all quality, and exhibited different patterns of connectedness than did the "normally" composed es saysand this despite the fact that all subjects wrote their visible ink essays first and could thereby be said to have had some practice in the experimental situation. The groups responded similarly on two of the significant measures: both graduate students and basic writers wrote shorter clauses of approximately the same length in invisible ink, and both groups showed a parallel decline in the quality of their essays from visible to invisible ink. It was only in the analysis of sentence connectedness that we found evidence of one group re- sponding differently from the other as an effect of writing in invisible ink.
The only significant difference on the sentence level, the reduction in clause length, may have been a result of incapacitation of memory. When sub- jects could not see what they had written, they may have reacted by decreasing memory load-putting fewer words or perhaps chunks of information into the basic perceptual unit, the clause, as might be predicted by Daiute's (1981)
G. A. HULL & W. L. SMITH
INK INK INK INK
FIG. 3. Mean percentage of remote ties and mean percentage of local ties, with standard errors by 9-0 inexperienced and 0-0 experienced writers
work on memory constraints and composing. Words per clause can, however, decrease without a concomitant decrease in words per T-unit for other reasons besides fewer words being written in each clause. Additional subordinate clauses and new main clauses could produce this effect, as could writing as full clauses what normally would be written as less than clausal structures. Since our second task was not a re-write of the first, we cannot say for sure which technique was used.
Whatever the explanation for the reduced clause length, this reduction cannot be used to explain the lower holistic ratings of the essays written when feedback was interrupted, for as Faigley (1980) has shown, words per T-unit and words per clause account for only three percent of the total variance in holistic evaluations. Nor can sentence-level error or clause placement be blamed, for frequencies and types remained similar across tasks. Since there were negligible differences on the sentence level between the writing done in invisible and visible ink, we would suggest that the lower holistic ratings of the essays when feedback was disrupted indicate that students lost control of their writing beyond the sentence and beyond the paragraph. Our analysis of sentence connectedness suggests that they may have lost control by being forced to alter their patterns of relating new information to previously given informa- tion.
Graduate students reacted to lack of visual feedback by relating new'hfor- mation to previously given information through an increased percentage of
VISUAL FEEDBACK IN WRITING 975
remote ties, and a decreased percentage of local ties. Perhaps this strategy resulted from the fact that they could not re-read previous sentences but pre- sumably could recall the gist of their prior assertions. If a writer lost track of the wording of a prior sentence, he could nonetheless begin a new sentence about the general topic of his paper. Such a strategy would not, of course, necessarily result in a well-formed text, for a sudden return to a general topic or a different subpoint might give the impression of disjointedness.
In contrast, basic writers reacted by increasing their percentages of local ties and decreasing their percentages of remote ties when writing in invisible ink. Since better writers have been shown to use more local ties (Witte &
Faigley, 1981), this strategy might be judged a beneficial one, resulting in greater connectedness between sentences. On further examination, however, we noticed that the increased percentage of local ties in basic writers' invisible ink papers had instead resulted in sentence connections that were strained and in- appropriate. For instance, in the following invisible-ink paragraph by a basic writer, the T-units are connected, in the main, by local ties to the word women, yet these local ties are superficial joinings of repetitive information.
1 I feel that wome should serve time in the armed forces but not in combat or - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - combat training but maybe in hospitals or desk jobs.// 2 Ever since the constitution - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L L was written up, women have argued for equal rights,// 3 and equally so I think they - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - should have equal rights.// 4 Now that they are getting closer to being equal to men - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L and have about the same rights as men, then they should have to be required to register - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L L also.// 5 If they want equal rights, then equal rights we'll give them.// G If women - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - are not required to register for the draft the I as a male will have to start campaigning - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
L for equal rights also,// 7 How can men and women be equal when men have to go to - - - - - - - - - - - - - - war but women don't because their feminine.// - - - - - - - - - -
Perhaps this use of local ties is a sign of these writers' increased attention to sentence-by-sentence production rather than the planning of the whole text. If this reasoning is accurate, then we might also speculate like Atwell (1981) that inexperienced writers have fewer strategies for the production of a whole text than more experienced writers. W e cannot, of course, be certain that the altered pattern of given-new information was the sole factor in reduced ratings of quality for both groups or, indeed, whether this change significantly affected quality at all.
Both groups of subjects wrote essays under both conditions which did not differ significantly in total amount of text produced, words per T-unit, types and frequencies of errors, and types, placement, and frequencies of clauses.
976 G. A. HULL & W. L. SMITH
This sentence-level constancy may have been the result of how we designed the study. That is, subjects may have received enough "practice" on the visible-ink task so that their sentence-level production was not affected by the invisible-ink condition. This interpretation, however, is unlikely for several reasons: our subjects did not know what their second task would be and could not "practice" for it consciously. Even if our subjects had known during the first trial that their next task would be to write an essay in invisible ink, it seems unlikely that they could have consciously practiced controlling sentence level error or manipulating syntax. Any unconscious practice effect resulting from the first task would seem more likely to affect the over-all planning of the text than sentence pro- duction, yet, as we pointed out earlier, subjects performed less well on the invisible-ink task in over-all quality and sentence connectedness.
A more likely explanation for the sentence-level constancy is that both . -
the inexperienced writers and experienced writers have an internalized written style-an habitual syntax perhapswhich they produce automatically in a timed-writing situation in response to a given topic. The possibility that these writers could produce such a style when feedback was interrupted perhaps suggesrs that part of learning to be a fluent writer is developing a memory for one's own written syntax. Or as Frawley (1981) suggests, the syntax of un- sophisticated writers may conform to "natural" syntactic tendencies which apply across languages, particularly as evidenced by these writers' habits of using relativization and sentential complementation.
For another explanation, one can turn to Ktashen (1981), who has hypothesized that second language learners use what he calls "acquired" lin- guistic knowledge in ordinary unmonitored speech, but that they can apply consciously learned rules only when there is sufficient processing time to moni- tor their speech. The subjects in our study, then, may have relied on an acquired linguistic knowledge in both tasks. Differences between tasks on the sentence level would appear only in revision, when subjects would have time to apply consciously learned knowledge about written language.
We infer from our data that the significance of visual feedback lies not in editing or manipulating syntax, but in managing larger units of discourse. This inference receives support from research by Flower and Hayes ( 1981), which suggests thac pauses before "episodes" in think-aloud protocols denote god-related activities, activities which go beyond sentence-level planning. If the significance of visual feedback lies in discourse planning, one might also be tempted to infer thac sentence-level production is "non-recursive" or can proceed independently of feedback-at least in a timed-writing simation. W e think, however, that such an inference would be hasty, for in this research we blocked only one feedback mechanism-visual re-scanning.
The fact that having writers compose in invisible ink disrupted the feed-
VISUAL FEEDBACK IN WRITING 977
back loop which governs composing only partially should, instead, serve to-re- mind us of how complex the composing feedback system is and how interrelated its components must be. Emig ( 1978) makes a similar point when she dis- cusses the "organic" structures involved in composing-eye, brain, and hand. In isolating a component like re-scanning, we ought not, then, to forget that others complement its function. Indeed, there may be such redundancy among feed- back components that inhibiting one does not inhibit the whole. While re- scanning allows a writer to compose recursively, other activities, perhaps un- observable or observable but ambiguous ones, contribute to recursion as well- both on the level of the sentence and the level of discourse.
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