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The Composing Styles Of Unskilled Writers Analysis

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Perl, Sondra. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Research in the Teaching of English 13.4 (1979): 317-36. Print.
Sondra Perl’s “The Composing Styles of Unskilled College Writers” explores how unskilled writers compose their pieces. In her article, Perl performs a study from 1975-76 at the City University of New York to analyze the composing process of five unskilled writers. Her research addressed three questions: “How do unskilled writers write? Can their writing process be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? And what does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in schools” (317)? Her goal was to study how unskilled …show more content…

The sample size of five students was not big enough and, if she studied more students, she would have received better results and she would have been able to make generalizations about the behaviors of unskilled writer. Also, she should have considered that her results could be misleading because the students cannot report every thought and decision as they write. Also, making the students compose in a laboratory setting may have affected their composing process because students would tend to be more comfortable in a setting like a dorm room or a library. She could have studied the processes of unskilled writers in their natural writing environment and then compared the results. With different subjects, many statistics, a professional researcher, and clear charts, the source is credible. Author Sondra Perl, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where she manages the Ph.D. program in composition and rhetoric. Perl has been leading writing workshops on college campuses and in universities, in North America and abroad, for over 20 years. Perl’s major argument is that teaching the composing process means paying attention to how the final product looks as well as to the recursive process through which students reach this process. This piece is intended for fellow teachers and researchers. The goal of Perl’s research was to look at and to understand the unskilled writer’s behaviors, fluencies, strategies, language usage, editing, and miscue analysis. Her findings include student’s rule confusion, selective perception, and

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