The Predrafting Processes of Four High- and Four Low-Apprehensive Writers.

This study investigated the predraf ting processes of four high and four low writing apprehensives. Eight college students composed aloud in response to two academic writing assignments and completed two interviews that identified their personal perceptions of their writing processes. The composing-aloud sessions were videotaped and all composing activities were timed and coded. After the data were analyzed and cross-checked, findings revealed that the four high writing apprehensives were less confident about their ability to compose an effective piece of prose, less facile at gathering important rhetorical information on audience and organization from their readings of assignments and less able to use this rhetorical information as they composed, less concerned with planning overall structures for their papers before beginning to plan the first sentence of their first draft, and less apt to use written prefiguring than were the four low writing apprehensives. The term "writing apprehension," originally coined in 1975 by Daly and Miller (1975b), refers to a generalized tendency to experience "some form of anxiety when faced with the task of encoding written messages." Much of the early research in writing apprehension was concerned with defining the theoretical construct of writing apprehension and establishing the validity of the Writing Apprehension Test (WAT), an instrument designed to measure that construct (Daly & Miller, 1975b, 1975c). Later research has explored the correlative and predictive functions of the WAT. Specific studies have connected scores on the WAT with choice of academic majors and careers (Daly & Shamo, 1976, 1978), scores on self-concept and self-confidence measures (Daly, 1979), and performance on various assessments of writing skill and writing quality, (Daly, 1978a, 1978b; Daly & Miller, 1975a, 1975d). To date, however, no substantive research has been done to define the relationship between writing apprehension and the processes students employ as they compose. It is not even certain, for example, how or to what extent the theoretical construct of writing apprehension is evidenced during the act of composing, whether, in other words, there are definable differences between the composing process of high and low apprehensives. The current study was designed to address this particular question. The research project reported in this paper had three main goals: 1. To record the predraf ting processes of several high and several low writing apprehensives engaged in academic writing. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 18, No. 1, February 1984