Do I Always Write in the Same Manner? Effects of the Communicative Purposes of the Tasks in the Temporal Organization during the Writing Process

Abstract

Our study aimed to determine whether the communicative purposes of the tasks affect pauses in the writing process as a function of the writer's level of experience and the interval in which these pauses appear. Regarding the methodology, an intra-subject design was used (n = 21; 13 women; M = 23 years, SD = 1.86). Each participant completed three writing tasks on a computer with a particular purpose: explain, record, and integrate. We used the keystroke logging technique to capture the process and conduct analyses. The participants were sorted into three groups according to their expertise (low, medium, and high). Also, each task was segmented into three periods. In the results, it was observed that the temporal organization related to the pauses behavior in three intervals of the process differ between the communicative purposes of the tasks. It was also observed that high-performance students maintain a relatively stable temporal organization among the three tasks, contrary to low performing students. Finally, it should be noted that the techniques we used in the study favor a deeper understanding of the process of textual production in academic contexts.