Discovery Through Writing: Relationships with Writing Processes and Text Quality

Abstract

This study compares a problem-solving account of discovery through writing, which attributes discovery to strategic rhetorical planning and assumes discovery is associated with better quality text, to a dual-process account, which attributes discovery to the combined effect of 2 conflicting processes with opposing relationships to text quality. Low and high self-monitors were asked to write under 2 planning conditions. Keystroke-logging was used to assess the relationship of writing processes with discovery and text quality. The results support the dual-process account: Discovery was related to spontaneous sentence production and global revision of text, which had opposing relationships with text quality.