Learning to Write Instructive Texts by Reader Observation and Written Feedback

Can young writers enhance the quality of their texts by observing real readers trying to comprehend them? What do these writers learn from such observations? In this chapter the authors suggest that writing instruction can be made more effective by making communication failures and successes observable. To a certain extent, writers are blind to the communicative failures in their texts since they have all the prior knowledge to fill in the gaps. On-line observation of readers may help them in detecting these gaps, and in learning to repair or avoid them.