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Using eye and pen movements to trace the development of writing expertise: case studies of a 7th, 9th and 12th grader, graduate student, and professional writer

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Abstract

This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the changing relationship between low- and high-level writing processes in the course of development. A dual description of writing processes was undertaken, based on (a) the respective time courses of these processes, as assessed by an analysis of eye and pen movements, and (b) the semantic characteristics of the writers’ scripts. To conduct a more fine-grained description of processing strategies, a “case study” approach was adopted, whereby a comprehensive range of measures was used to assess processes within five writers with different levels of expertise. The task was to continue writing a story based on excerpt from a source document (incipit). The main results showed two developmental patterns linked to expertise: (a) a gradual acceleration in low- and high-level processing (pauses, flow), associated with (b) changes in the way the previous text was (re)read.

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Notes

  1. Expressed in milliseconds, the minimum value for pause thresholds is determined by the formula 3 × (1,000/sampling rate). For example, with a 200 Hz sampling tablet, i.e., sampling 200 pen positions per second (=1,000 ms), the minimum threshold will be: 3 × (1,000/200) = 15 ms. As the "loss" of one or two consecutive data samples may occur during the acquisition or transmission of the data to the programme Eye and Pen imposes a minimum value equal to the duration of three samples.

  2. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Foltz, Kintsch, & Landauer, 1998). The underlying idea is that the totality of information about all the word contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and set of words to each other (see http://lsa.colorado.edu/).

  3. Here, a fixation was coded “outside” each time it lasted longer than 100 ms and occurred in a non-informative zone of the screen (neither on the incipit, nor on the text produced so far).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nadia Rodier (educator in “France Bloch Sarrazin” college) for her help in the experiment management, Marie-Françoise Crété for the editing and Elizabeth Portier for her translation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory CeRCA, GDR 2657, CNRS, University of Poitiers, MSHS, 99 avenue du Recteur Pineau, 86000, Poitiers, France

    Denis Alamargot & Eric Lambert

  2. Laboratory MoDyCo, GDR 2657, CNRS, University of Paris-Sorbonne, IUFM de Paris, 10 rue Molitor, 75000, Paris, France

    Sylvie Plane

  3. MSHS, GDR 2657, CNRS, University of Poitiers, 99 avenue du Recteur Pineau, 86000, Poitiers, France

    David Chesnet

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  1. Denis Alamargot
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  2. Sylvie Plane
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Correspondence to Denis Alamargot.

Appendices

Appendix

Incipit: excerpt taken from Belle du Seigneur [Her Lover], by Albert Cohen (175 words)

French version

Aude se dit en passant devant la bibliothèque qu’une porte en somme la séparait de l’homme et qu’il fallait à tout prix avoir une explication. En finir, mon Dieu! Elle en avait assez. Certainement il l’avait suivie ce matin. Assez d’être persécutée par ce sourire. Elle lui ferait comprendre qu’il devait partir, qu’il était ignoble de jouer ainsi avec Jacques et Adrienne. Angoissée et sentant qu’elle avait tort, elle poussa la porte, éprouvant sur le seuil la délectation du vertige et peut-être l’affreuse joie de suivre la mauvaise voie destinée de toute éternité.

  • Je vous dérange.

  • Quoi? demanda-t-il avec hargne ahurissement, distraction et génialité.

  • Je vous dérange.

  • Oui oui merci.

Elle s’approcha des rayons, fit une pile de livres qui tombèrent.

  • Vous avez terminé vos recherches bibliographiques? demanda-t-il gravement, en faisant avec la cordelière de sa robe moirée un mouvement menaçant de fronde.

Elle chercha en vain une phrase insolente et s’avança sans savoir ce qu’elle allait dire.

English version

As she walked past the library, Aude told herself that only a door stood between her and the man she absolutely needed to have it out with. How she longed to get it over and done with! She had enough—enough of being persecuted by that smile. He had definitely followed her that morning. She would make it quite clear to him that he had to leave, that it was simply appalling to toy with Jacques and Adrienne in that fashion. With mounting trepidation and the uneasy feeling that she was making a mistake, she pushed the door open. As she crossed the threshold, she experienced an intoxicating thrill and perhaps, too, the dreadful joy of following the wrong path as she had always been destined to do.

  • ‘I’m disturbing you.’

  • ‘What?’ he asked, with a mixture of spite, stupefaction, absent-mindedness and consummate cleverness.

  • ‘I’m disturbing you.’

  • ‘Yes, yes, please do.’

  • She went up to the shelves and made a pile of books, which promptly collapsed.

  • ‘You’ve finished your bibliographic research?’ he inquired gravely, giving a mutinous tug to the cord of his moiré dressing gown.

  • She cast around in vain for an insolent rejoinder and moved forward, with absolutely no idea of what she was going to say.

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Alamargot, D., Plane, S., Lambert, E. et al. Using eye and pen movements to trace the development of writing expertise: case studies of a 7th, 9th and 12th grader, graduate student, and professional writer. Read Writ 23, 853–888 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-009-9191-9

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