How to deal with the complexity of the task?
Language production can be an overwhelming task. To deal with its complexity, people have conceived a wide range of strategies and tools: decomposition of the whole task, incremental processing[1] [2], use of external resources (encyclopedias, dictionaries) or material support (text editors, pen and paper), allowing them to jot down ideas, make an outline, write a draft, etc.
Writing is not only re-writing but also thinking. We cannot just dump our ideas onto the world; we must give them a certain structure and form. Scardamalia and Bereiter [SCA 87] introduced the important distinction between knowledge-telling and knowledge-transforming. Novices use this first strategy, expressing ideas basically in the order in which they come to their mind, making text production look like a linear process, while in reality it is a hierarchical one [MAN 87]. There is a main point, there are subsidiary points, transitions from one level to the next, etc. What the knowledgeteller’s strategy is crucially lacking is a purposeful reflection concerning the content, role and form of the elements to be used. The author seems to be a prisoner of his associations. Rather than stepping back and deciding from there “what” to say, “when” and “how”, s/he jumps too quickly to verbal delivery. Moreover, the fact that this behavior is largely controlled by local associations (what to say next?) makes everything look as if it were on the same plane.
The second production mode, knowledge-transforming, is generally used by mature writers who develop far more elaborated networks (more connections, better integration among goals) than novices. Knowledgetransforming can be characterized by an inclusion in the writing process of reflective operations that transform intentional, structural and conceptual representations (gist). Analysis of thinking-aloud protocols [FLO 80] has shown that mature writers plan by globally working through a writing task at an abstract level before working through it at a more concrete level. During the text production process, problems are tackled both at the level of content (what do I mean?) and at the level of form (how do I say it?). Reflection on both levels during composition leads to the transformation of content and form, giving rise to new thoughts.
In sum, there is a fundamental difference between expert and novice writing with respect to the nature of planning. Planning by beginners is opportunistic and driven by local constraints, while the planning by experts is strategic: the writer plans much carefully what she wants to say and how to express “things”. It is mainly the authors’ goals that determine content, structure and form. As we can see, writing is not an easy task and we are wondering whether and to what extent computers could help. We will focus here only on one task, coherence, i.e. grouping messages by category. Yet before doing so, let us take a look at the work done by computational linguists, cognitive psychologists and rhetoricians on whose theories any good application rests.
- [1] Note that topic shifts can be triggered by various linguistic devices: voice (active/passive) orverb choice (buy vs. sell). Proper control of topics is important, as the reader interprets theclause accordingly.
- [2] Psychologists [KEM 87] have studied incremental processing noting that speakers startexpression (articulation) before having fully encoded, i.e. completely specified all the detailsof the message. What holds for speaking holds, of course, also for writing.
