Effects of Writing on Conceptual Coherence

Current cognitive models of writing attribute the discovery of new ideas through writing to explicit problem-solving processes, and treat text production as a passive process of translating ideas into text. This paper describes an alternative, dual-process model of writing, in which text production is assumed to be an active knowledge-constituting process. A key prediction of the model is that dispositionally guided text production will lead to the development of more conceptually coherent new ideas than writing directed towards extrinsic goals. An experiment designed to test this prediction is then described. The results confirm that dispositionally produced new ideas are relatively more conceptually coherent than new ideas produced to satisfy rhetorical goals.