Reading Research and the Composition Teacher: The Importance of Plans

Abstract

A plan consists of a goal and steps to achieve that goal. Plans are obviously a central component of the processes of communicating and understanding. A writer must evolve some general plan of what to say; and a reader must somehow be able to follow the plan along. However, there has so far been only a small amount of work which relates the psychology of planning to the act of writing.2 It might be helpful to consider some research on reading as a potential means of exploring the role of planning. Reading research has demonstrated the important role played by the mental representation formed in the mind of human beings who read texts. This representation cannot be the text itself; that is, it cannot be a linear series of individual words as presented on the page. Although this mental representation is important for many tasks, such as writing, reporting, summarizing, commenting, and so forth, readers will seldom be able to provide a wordfor-word account of the original text. Therefore, a better understanding of what this mental representation is and how it forms in long-term memory should help a writer plan texts which enable their readers to create representations that better match the writer's purpose in the communication. For a writer, the plan is like a set of directions about how to present one's materials. I shall be concerned here with three important functions that writing plans have. In their topical function, they help a writer conceive and organize main ideas on a topic. In their highlighting function, they help the writer show the reader how some ideas are of greater importance than others. In their informing function, they help the writer see how to present new knowledge while keeping readers aware of the old.

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