Cognitive and Linguistic Demands of Analytic Writing.

To investigate the thinking processes students employ and the text structures they produce in analytic writing, this study contrasted eleventh grade students' analytic and summary writing. Ten high and ten average ability writers each participated in two composing-aloud sessions, writing one analytic and one summary essay based on their reading of history passages. Think-aloud protocols were divided into individual communication units, which were analyzed for three categories representing underlying features of the writing process. Essays were examined for the genre conventions governing students' writing. Multivariate analysis of variance techniques explored results of the protocol and essay analyses. In analytic writing, students employed more varied and complex thinking operations than in summary writing, asking more complicated questions, making higher-level plans, and spending more time interpreting the readings and evaluating their own essays. Results suggest ways in which writing serves as a heuristic a tool for critical thinking about subject matter. In secondary school and beyond, a considerable portion of students' writing assignments can be characterized as analytic. Ranging from interpretations of literary works to discussions of historical, social, and scientific issues, these assignments involve moving beyond summary restatement of content to more focused examination of relations among ideas and events. In high school, the most common form of analytic writing is the thesis/support essay, where students employ a pattern of generalization and supporting detail to explain a point of view (Applebee, 1984; Durst, 1984). It has become a truism in the field of composition, and a central tenet of "writing across the curriculum" advocates (Fulwiler & Young, 1982; Martin, 1984), to say that such activities help develop critical reasoning skills. Yet despite a widespread belief in the heuristic value of analytic writing, we know little about how students actually approach such tasks. Two lines of research have studied analytic writing, the first focusing on students' written texts. Britton, Burgess, Martin, McCloud, and Rosen (1975) and Applebee (1981, 1984) examined school writing using an "abstractive scale" for expository prose. At the lower end of the scale are summaries of The author would like to thank Arthur Applebee, Judith Langer, and Siusan Durst for their help with this project. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 21, No. 4, December 1987