The psychologist as wordsmith: a questionnaire study of the writing strategies of productive British psychologists

Abstract

Eighty-eight productive British psychologists completed a questionnaire on their writing habits and on their attitudes to and feelings about academic writing. The data were analysed in three ways. Firstly, an overall descriptive profile of the 'average' productive writer was drawn up by examining the most frequent responses to individual items on the questionnaire. Secondly, cluster analyses were carried out to determine if there were groups of productive individuals who set about their writing in distinctive ways. These analyses revealed groups of writers who could be distinguished in terms of their styles of composition (labelled 'thinkers' versus 'doers') and in terms of their attitudes and feelings (labelled 'anxious' versus 'enthusiastic'). Thirdly, step-wise regression was used to isolate correlates of higher productivity for different products -books, book chapters and papers. The results suggested that different writing patterns accompanied the production of these different products. The highly productive writers of books were less likely to claim to be sporadic writers, and more likely to claim that they did sections of their writing in a single draft. The highly productive writers of chapters were more likely to be responding to commissions to write for an editor or colleague and their writing was aided a good deal by secretarial provision. The highly productive writers of papers did not always enjoy expressing what they wanted to say as much as their less productive colleagues, but they felt that their writing was very important to them. These findings are discussed in relation to research on academic writing in other disciplines, and the paper concludes with some prescriptive advice to authors should they wish to increase their productivity.

The writing strategies of graduate research students in the social sciences

“…There are possible parallels between the present findings on strategy effectiveness and those of Hartley and Branthwaite (1989). In some respects the Planners in our study resembled Hartley and Branthwaite's Doers (characterised by few drafts and high productivity), while the Revisers resembled Hartley and Branthwaite's Thinkers (many drafts and lower productivity than the Doers).…”

“…This measure is not directly comparable with either productivity measured in the publication rates of established academic writers (e.g., Kellogg 1986;Hartley and Branthwaite 1989) or with simple measures of fluency (the amount of text of any quality that can be produced in a given period of time). However, productivity calculated in this way would seem to give a reasonable indication of how smoothly the students writing is progressing whilst taking account of variation in the total anlOunt of text produced at different times during a research degree programme.…”

“…How this is achieved varies considerably from writer to writer (Chandler 1992;Hartley and Branthwaite, 1989;Hartley and Knapper, 1984;Lowenthal and Wason, 1977). One approach is to focus effort on the pre-writing stage by producing a detailed written outline which is then used as the basis for a full draft.…”

“…Kellogg (1987) found that the self-reported productivity of science faculty who wrote outlines (about half his sample) was significantly greater than for those who did not. Hartley and Branthwaite (1989), through cluster analysis of data from a survey of psychologists with good publication records, identified two distinct groups of writers. One group, the "Thinkers", tended to spend a long time thinking about how to structure a piece, rewrote substantially and produced several drafts.…”

On the Challenges of Collaborative Data Processing

“…Indeed, specialization may be more effective. Among prolific book writers, dividing up the task into chapters is a common strategy (Hartley & Branthwaite, 1989). Posner and Baecker (1993) provide several reasons to specialize the writing tasks including: access to technology and software, social status, familiarity with the requirements, and uniformity of the final product.…”