What makes a skilled writer? Working memory and audience awareness during text composition

Effects of ADHD on Writing Composition Product and Process in School-Age Students

Objective: This study examined the relationship between ADHD and writing performance. Method: Students in Grades 3 to 7, 84 with ADHD and 135 age- and gender-matched controls completed a writing task (including process logs), and measures of working memory and attention. Results: Students with ADHD wrote texts of similar length but with poorer structure, coherence, and ideation. In all, 6.7% of the variance in writing quality was explained by whether or not the student had an ADHD diagnosis, after control for IQ and age-within-year, with ADHD students producing text that was less coherent, well structured, and ideationally rich, and spending less time thinking about and reviewing their text. Half of the effect on text quality could be attributed to working memory and sustained attention effects. Conclusion: ADHD has some effect on writing performance, which can, in part, be explained by working memory and attentional deficits.

Online management of text production from pictures: a comparison between fifth graders and undergraduate students

This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the online management of writing processes by two groups of writers with a different level of expertise, and to explore the impact of this online management on text quality. To this aim, fifth graders (mean age 10.5 years) and undergraduate students (mean age 22.6 years) were asked to compose a narrative from a visual source of images, while their handwriting activity and eye movements were recorded by means of Eye & Pen software and a digitizing tablet. Results showed that fifth graders and undergraduate students used different strategies to engage in high-level source-based text elaboration processes throughout their writing. The main differences concerned the density of source consultation during prewriting, on the one hand, and during pauses, on the other hand. Relationships between these characteristics of online management and text quality were minimal in fifth graders, while in undergraduate students they were more substantial as in the case of syntactic complexity. These findings suggest that with age, the online management of writing becomes more closely related to text quality. In line with a capacity view of writing, it is also concluded that the online management of writing processes of fifth graders is highly constrained by a lack of fluent text production skills which ultimately affects their text quality.

Reading during the composition of multi-sentence texts: an eye-movement study

Writers composing multi-sentence texts have immediate access to a visual representation of what they have written. Little is known about the detail of writers' eye movements within this text during production. We describe two experiments in which competent adult writers' eye movements were tracked while performing short expository writing tasks. These are contrasted with conditions in which participants read and evaluated researcher-provided texts. Writers spent a mean of around 13 % of their time looking back into their text. Initiation of these look-back sequences was strongly predicted by linguistically important boundaries in their ongoing production (e.g., writers were much more likely to look back immediately prior to starting a new sentence). 36 % of look-back sequences were associated with sustained reading and the remainder with less patterned forward and backward saccades between words ("hopping"). Fixation and gaze durations and the presence of word-length effects suggested lexical processing of fixated words in both reading and hopping sequences. Word frequency effects were not present when writers read their own text. Findings demonstrate the technical possibility and potential value of examining writers' fixations within their just-written text. We suggest that these fixations do not serve solely, or even primarily, in monitoring for error, but play an important role in planning ongoing production.