Understanding the materiality of writing from multiple sources

Writing research has typically focussed on the text production elements of writing. Many everyday writing tasks, however, cannot be characterised simply in terms of text production since they often involve the use of source materials to support the composition process. As such, these tasks are better thought of as hybrid tasks. Such hybrid tasks have been given relatively little attention in the literature and what little work has been done has taken a purely cognitive approach that downplays the material context within which the task takes place. Following Haas’ critique of mainstream writing research which advocated the need to consider the material tools and artefacts in theories of writing, this paper takes a similar approach in relation to the hybrid tasks of writing while reading from multiple sources. A study is presented that explores a range of everyday writing from multiple sources in their real world contexts. The study highlights a number of important characteristics of the interaction with the material artefacts used during these tasks and the impact that these have on the underlying cognitive processes. The hope is that these will begin to offer some grounding on which future theoretical understanding of these hybrid tasks can build, as well as providing useful insights into the design of technologies to support these tasks.