Toward a Taxonomy of Beginning Writers' Evaluative Statements on Written Compositions

Abstract

A writer's evaluation of text plays critical, but little examined, roles in the writer's production of text and development as writer. Twenty students, grades 2-6, ranked unevaluated sets of compositions that they or anonymous peers had written; they then were prompted to discuss the factors upon which their rankings were based. Analysis of their evaluations suggests that bases for evaluations can be described in four categories: feelings aroused by text; responses to surface features; responses to text as understood; responses to craftsmanship.Many experts contend that the current "writing crisis" results from "skills deficits." Yet it is difficult to read through the catalogue of writing errors discussed by Shaughnessy (1977) without at least entertaining the possibility that behind the various skills deficits lurks a causal array of their creators' cognitive differences. Emig (1982), Lunsford (1979, and others who relate writing skills to a developmental framework have pointed out that writing tasks that demand cognitive operations beyond an individual writer's abilities are likely to stunt rather than challenge the development of required skills.Several recent studies have investigated the relationship between cognitive development and writing abilities. Graves (1982Graves ( , 1983 has used the accumulated data from his years of research with children's writing to sketch the order in which a child's consciousness of writing

"This Is Hard, Isn't It?": Children Evaluating Writing

“…Whenever a child made a remark that was a judgment of a story, it was considered an evaluation comment. The remarks were scored according to a modified version of Hilgers' (1984Hilgers' ( , 1986 classification scheme for evaluation statements. When a child offered the same response to probes about a story, the comments were scored as a single instance.…”

“…For Ahmed, the Liking category also included references to whether he had liked writing about a topic: "I didn't want to write about this." As Newkirk (1982) and Hilgers (1984) have pointed out, these evaluations are not really responses to the text per se, so much as responses to memories and associations cued by the text.…”

“…Writing process research has provided considerable evidence of the incidence and frequency of evaluation acts in the revision processes of native-English-speaking students (e.g., Bridwell, 1980;Calkins, 1983Calkins, , 1986Dyson, 1983;Emig, 1971;Flower & Hayes, 1981b;Graves, 1983;Perl, 1979;Sommers, 1980) and nonnative-English-speaking students (e.g., Gomez, 1985aGomez, , 1985bRaimes, 1985;Samway, 1987;Urzúa, 1987;Zamel, 1982Zamel, , 1983. Research suggests that the ability to make successful evaluations is critical to the writing process because neither revision nor generation of ideas and text would occur without evaluation (Flower & Hayes, 1981a;Hilgers, 1984Hilgers, , 1986. Little is known, however, about the standards that either adults or children employ when evaluating writing.…”