w communication technologies. Collaboration, in particular, has been enhanced by new document sharing and editing tools. Today's Web editors and word processors offer unparalled control over the design of our writing.
What Do Research and Scholarship Tell Us about Effective Composing Strategies?
By conducting interviews, case studies, and protocol analyses of writers at work, researchers in the field of composition and rhetoric have uncovered important insights regarding effective writing habits. Below are a few of the important insights researchers have discovered regarding how college students and professionals manage writing processes:
Successful writers often describe their composing strategies as recursive. By recursive, they mean that they engage in a variety of writing strategies in a non-linear manner. For example, they may begin by collaborating with others, then try inventing on their own, then consult authorities and scholars via research, and then return to collaborating. From composition research and scholarship, we know that many students do not plan or revise as much as professional writers. Unsuccessful writers may become trapped in a single composing strategy. For example, they may get stuck researching, thinking they need to read absolutely everything before writing. Inexperienced students may believe they receive low grades because they weren't "born writers" when the real truth is that they aren't really employing the invention, revising, and editing strategies that more successful writers use.
Playing the Believing Game
Playing the Believing Game refers to the importance of trusting yourself and your writing process, of setting aside doubt and giving yourself room to work through a number of drafts until you express your intentions. As much as you can, give yourself positive messages when first starting to write a document.
Sometimes when you're writing you'll know exactly what you want to say and do. But there are other times when you are less sure, when you just know when you get it wrong. At times when the writing task is more exploratory and speculative, Sondra Perl, a compositionist, suggests we need to follow our "felt sense"-- our nonverbal feel of what we hope to say.
Work With Your Felt Senses
Admittedly, this advice -- to play the believing game and trust your felt sense -- may sound ridiculously "touchy feely." Fortunately, from studying the composing strategies of successful academic writers (as well as blocked writers), we can offer additional advice to help you navigate the early stages of the writing process. To help you improve as a writer, I strongly encourage you to learn more about the effective habits of successful academic writers by scanning the following documents:
- As mentioned in the Play the Believing Game section, in the early stages of writing, you want to play the believing game and trust your felt sense. In other words, when first beginning a project, you want to try and ignore negative, critical thoughts.
- In contrast, Play the Doubting Game is more critical and analytical. During Play the Doubting Game, you want to attack your documents--and invite your friends and peers to attack your work.