The Study of Professional Writing

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Alamargot ◽  
Jean-Louis Lebrave

In this article, we argue that examining the writing processes of literary authors would enrich and extend empirical research on writing, which is currently grounded in cognitive psychology. In most empirical studies of writing skills, experts are defined as either advanced students or technical writers, neither of whom work within the same constraints or timeframes as literary authors. Including literary authors in psychological accounts of writing, by drawing on the observations of genetic criticism (a linguistic-literary discipline that reconstructs the genesis of an author’s manuscript by collecting and interpreting the notes, drafts, revisions, successive versions, etc.), would add to our knowledge of professional writing. Two issues could then be considered: (a) the way the creative process takes place during writing and (b) the role of memory in the management of writing processes over extended time periods.

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karol Marek Klimczak ◽  
Marta Dynel

Professionals and individuals who invest in equity markets rely on financial analysts’ recommendations and reports to decide on what to invest in and when to trade. This study examines the role of two groups of communication strategies, evaluation markers and mitigators, in establishing analysts’ credibility. The sample consists of 80 reports written in Polish for companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange in Poland. In this emerging market setting, where credibility is challenged by uncertainty, analysts deploy various strategies depending on the recommendation they make: “buy,” “hold,” or “sell” shares. The findings point toward a specific group of mitigators, namely subjectivization, as a means of communicating expert opinion. Regression results reveal that investors’ reaction to the publication of a recommendation to “hold” or “sell” shares, measured based on the changes in share prices, is stronger when subjectivization is used in a report. The findings carry implications for research into analyst behavior and for the development of professional writing skills.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-77
Author(s):  
James Little

This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s use of the asylum in his novel Malone Dies to explore the role of non-textual elements in genetic criticism (the study of a writer’s creative process through the analysis of their compositional manuscripts), as well as the function of the author in genetic analysis. Taking as its starting point Iain Bailey’s challenge to genetic critics to account for the biographical author which underpins the discipline’s study of written traces in authorial manuscripts, the article contends that genetic criticism must be used in tandem with other approaches such as historicism when studying spaces like Beckett’s asylums. Though Beckett took a scholarly approach when integrating such material into earlier work, making research notes which can be regarded as part of the genetic dossier, the asylum in Malone Dies – based on Dublin’s Saint John of God Hospital – leaves no such trail of textual breadcrumbs. Therefore, we must pay particular attention to the historical function of Saint John of God’s in order to understand how the asylum works in composition and reception. In doing so, an author existing beyond the written traces they leave behind can retake their place in a necessarily incomplete empirical field over five decades after Roland Barthes prematurely declared their death.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca De Vita ◽  
Susanna Schmidt ◽  
Carla Tinti ◽  
Anna Maria Re

Literature has extensively demonstrated the coordination role of working memory (WM) in complex tasks such as writing. However, previous studies mostly concentrated on the relation between passive WM (e.g., WM span) components and specific writing tasks (e.g., dictation). Here, we aimed to investigate the relationship between different writing skills and the performance on a WM updating task measuring the more active components of WM. From a pool of 160 Italian pupils (grades 3–5), we selected 46 children divided in two groups based on their WM updating performance. The first group consisted of 21 children with low WM updating performance (≤10th percentile), the second group consisted of 25 children with high WM updating performance (≥90th percentile). All children were tested on a battery of writing tasks to assess writing speed, orthographic skills, and competences in expressive writing. MANOVAs and a discriminant analysis were computed to assess group differences and the contribution of the different writing tests in correctly predicting group membership. The results revealed that children with high WM updating performance scored significantly higher than children with low WM updating performance on most of the writing tasks. These results highlight the relevant role of the active components of WM on writing processes. In addition, they suggest that the improvement of writing skills should rely not only on the training of the specific processes implied in this complex task, but also on the training of the cognitive processes that support them, such as active WM processes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsey E. Medeiros ◽  
Logan M. Steele ◽  
Logan L. Watts ◽  
Michael D. Mumford
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Zosia Kuczyńska

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.


Author(s):  
Dubravka Glasnović Gracin

AbstractA mathematics textbook can be described as an officially authorized and pedagogically designed mathematics book written to provide mathematical knowledge to students. This description suggests the authority of the textbook - because it has been authorized by an administrative source and because it deals with authorized knowledge. This paper provides an overview of research on mathematics textbooks. The emphasis is on questions concerning the extent to which and how textbooks are used in mathematics education in Croatia and in the world.Research results show that mathematics textbooks are widely used in mathematics education worldwide. This finding points to the need for research on the content and structure of textbooks. Such studies are combined with the associated results on how textbooks are used in the classroom and which methods teachers apply in using textbooks in mathematics education. The results of the empirical studies show that teachers use textbooks for lesson preparation and pupils use mathematics textbooks for exercises to a great extent. These results imply that such an important role of textbooks in mathematics education deserves additional attention, with the goal of understanding and improving mathematics education.Key words: mathematics education; overview; research on textbook---SažetakMatematički udžbenik može se opisati kao službeno autorizirana i pedagoki osmiljena matematička knjiga napisana s ciljem da učenicima ponudi matematičke sadržaje. Taj opis sugerira autoritet udžbenika jer ga je autorizirao administrativni izvor i jer sadrži autorizirano znanje. Ovaj članak daje pregled istraživanja matematičkih udžbenika, a naglasak je na pitanjima u kojoj mjeri i kako se udžbenici koriste u nastavi matematike u Hrvatskoj i u svijetu.Rezultati raznih istraživanja pokazuju da se udžbenici u velikoj mjeri koriste u nastavi matematike irom svijeta. Taj nalaz ukazuje na potrebu za istraživanjem sadržaja i strukture matematičkih udžbenika. Uz to, prikazani su rezultati istraživanja o tome na koji se način udžbenici koriste u razredu i koje metode nastavnici prakticiraju prilikom upotrebe udžbenika na nastavi. Rezultati empirijskih studija pokazuju da nastavnici udžbenike većinom koriste za pripremu nastavnog sata, a učenici udžbenike koriste u najvećoj mjeri za vježbanje. Ti rezultati ukazuju na to da tako važna uloga udžbenika u matematičkom obrazovanju zaslužuje dodatnu pažnju s ciljem razumijevanja i poboljanja nastave matematike.Ključne riječi: istraživanje udžbenika; nastava matematike; pregled.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-18
Author(s):  
Tsvetanka Tsenova

This article focuses on the relationship between literacy methods applied at school and the emergence of serious difficulties in mastering reading and writing skills that shape the developmental dyslexia. The problem was analyzed theoretically and subjected to empirical verification. Experimental work was presented which aims to study the phonological and global reading skills of 4- th grade students with and without dyslexia. Better global reading skills have been demonstrated in all tested children, and this is much more pronounced in those with dyslexia than their peers without disorders. Hence, the need to develop a special, corrective methodology for literacy of students with developmental dyslexia consistent with their psychopathological characteristics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
Alexandra V. Shiller

The article analyzes the role of theories of embodied cognition for the development of emotion research. The role and position of emotions changed as philosophy developed. In classical and modern European philosophy, the idea of the “primacy of reason” prevailed over emotions and physicality, emotions and affective life were described as low-ranking phenomena regarding cognitive processes or were completely eliminated as an unknown quantity. In postmodern philosophy, attention focuses on physicality and sensuality, which are rated higher than rational principle, mind and intelligence. Within the framework of this approach, there is a recently emerged theory of embodied cognition, which allows to take a fresh look at the place of emotions in the architecture of mental processes – thinking, perception, memory, imagination, speech. The article describes and analyzes a number of empirical studies showing the impossibility of excluding emotional processes and the significance of their research for understanding the architecture of embodied cognition. However, the features of the architecture of embodied cognition remain unclear, and some of the discoveries of recent years (mirror neurons or neurons of simulation) rather raise new questions and require further research. The rigorously described and clear architecture of the embodied cognition can grow the theoretical basis that will allow to advance the studies of learning processes, language understanding, psychotherapy techniques, social attitudes and stereotypes, highlight the riddle of consciousness and create new theories of consciousness or even create an anthropomorphic artificial intelligence that is close to “strong artificial intelligence.”


Author(s):  
Mek Wok Mahmud ◽  
Sayed Sikandar Shah Haneef

Reversion to Islam while opening golden opportunities for a revert in terms of divine guidance and spiritual salvation is coming with somewhat insurmountable challenges in terms of Islamization of the self, family and contributions to the overall development of Malaysia as a multi-religious country. This is especially so when Islam as an official religion has made the issue of Islamization of the Malaysian society and its systems amongst the pivotal national agendas in the country.  As to what is the role of Chinese Muslims (reverts) in the process, studies, among others, have purported to present the statistics about their share in socio-economic development. Similarly, empirical studies point to the odds faced by this community at personal, family and community levels in their path for transition to the full Islamic way of life. To the presenters of this paper, however, the macro dimension of what it means to become a Muslim which is essential for adjustment to the Islamic requirements has not been sufficiently highlighted in discourses in the area. Accordingly, this paper presents the position statements on Islamic expectations from Chinese reverts with the purpose of motivating them to achieve greater things in the area of Islamization of their community and the nation to the effect. Keywords: Chinese converts, Islamization, expectations and challenges. Abstrak kembalinya seseorang kepada agama Islam selain dari membuka peluang keemasan dalam mendapat  petunjuk Ilahi dan pengisian rohani turut disertai dengan cabaran yang amat sukar untuk diatasi termasuklah cabaran Islamisasi diri, keluarga serta sumbangan kepada pembangunan keseluruhan Malaysia sebagai negara berbilang agama. Hal ini menjadi satu keutamaan terutamanya apabila Islam memegang status sebagai agama rasmi persekutuan yang menjadikan isu Islamisasi masyarakat Malaysia sebagai satu agenda nasional. Bagi menjayakan agenda ini, peranan umat Islam dari kalangan masyarakat Cina (cina muslim) juga perlu diambil kira. Statistik menunjukkan cina muslim turut mempunyai bahagian dalam menyumbang terhadap pembangunan sosio-ekonomi negara. Dalam pada masa yang sama, kajian empirikal membuktikan adanya bentuk bentuk cabaran yang dihadapi oleh komuniti ini di peringkat peribadi, keluarga dan komuniti dalam perjalanan mereka untuk kembali kepada cara hidup Islam yang sepenuhnya. Bagi kami pengkaji kertas ini, dimensi makro dalam menjadikan dan mengertikan  seseorang itu Muslim terutamanya dalam menyesuaikan diri dengan ajaran  Islam masih belum cukup diberi  penjelasan dan penerangan yang sewajarnya. Oleh itu, makalah ini cuba menerangkan idea dan cadangan yang berguna kepada cina muslim dengan tujuan memotivasikan  mereka bagi  mencapai kejayaan  yang lebih besar dari aspek Islamisasi di kalangan komuniti mereka seterusnya memberi sumbangan kepada negara. Kata kunci:  Cina Muslim, Islamisasi, harapan dan cabaran.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document