Reading, Writing, and Knowing: The Role of Disciplinary Knowledge in Comprehension and Composing.

To explore how writers, with extensive experience and learning in an academic discipline, used both topical and rhetorical knowledge to construct synthesis essays, 40 graduate students, equally representing the two disciplines of psychology and business, wrote synthesis essays on either the topics of "supply-side economics" or "rehearsal in memory." Half of the writers completed think-aloud protocols, and their composing processes were analyzed for different qualities and frequencies of elaborations and rhetorical awareness and for task representation. Their written products (40 essays) were analyzed for the importance and origin of information and for the quality of key rhetorical moves. Analyses of variance revealed that "high-knowledge" writers evidence unique elaborative and rhetorically-sensitive performance, although awareness of "structure" and "content" were more sensitive to specific topics and disciplines. They also included more "new" information in their essays in the top levels of essay organizations. Low-knowledge writers elaborated less, but did rely on structural and content-based awareness to compose, and included comparable amounts of "borrowed-implicit" information in their essays. Intercorrelations of process and product features revealed that evaluative elaborations and awareness of rhetorical context corresponded with the presence of new information in essays for all 40 writers. The findings confirm the interrelatedness of comprehension and composing processes and illustrate how writers, with varying levels of topic familiarity, use both their knowledge of disciplinary topics and their experience as readers and writers to compose synthesis essays. READING, WRITING, AND KNOWING: THE ROLE OF DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE IN COMPREHENSION AND COMPOSING

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