Planning in Writing: The Cognition of a Constructive Process

Planning in writing is a strategic response to both the writing situation and the writers own knowledge. This paper describes the process adult writers bring to ill-defined, expository tasks, such as writing essays, articles, reports and proposals. In planning, writers draw on nest and integrate three executive level strategies knowledge-driven planning, script- or schema-driven planning, and constructive planning. research in both instructional and academic writing suggests that writers may fail to turn to a constructive strategy even when ill-defined tasks demand it. This paper presents a theory of constructive planning based on a detailed analysis of expert and novice writers. It isolates five critical features of this constructive strategy, in which writers must create a unique network of working goals and deal with the special problems of integration, conflict resolution and instantiation this constructive process entails. The paper describes the strategies writers use to meet these demands and some expertnovice differences that affect the integration of the entire plan. This theoretical framework also suggests some goals for instruction and the support of planning. Keywords Cognition. SDW