Writing Under the Infl uence (of the Writing Process (original) (raw)

This chapter illustrates the trends toward global writing research across languages, integration of social with cognitive writing research, and increasing emphasis on adult writing research related to the workplace and professional development. In the fi rst part of the chapter Roger Graves gives an overview of the cognitive approaches to writing studies in English Canada since the 1980s. Although writing studies in English Canada began with a focus on cognitive studies of writing processes, more recent work has focused on the social more than the cognitive part of social cognition. Most of the research done centers on professional writing by researchers in technical and professional writing. This work has become increasingly linked with genre study approaches that link social cognition, genre, and rhetorical studies in a multimodal research approach. In the second part of the chapter Céline Beaudet outlines 20 years of effort in French-speaking Quebec universities to move from a normative and prescriptive approach of writing to a comprehensive view of both writing products and the writing process. Research in Quebec draws from the French and English traditions of linguistic discourse analysis, cognitive research on written composition, and rhetoric studies. Thus writing studies incorporate a special twist different from that in Englishspeaking Canada. In the third part of the chapter Bertrand Labasse refl ects on the results of 30 years of international research on the psychology of writing and its impact on professional writers and describes a four-axis pedagogical intervention based on his experience teaching advanced journalism and scientifi c popularization. Together, these three sections give a deep and broad picture of cognitive studies of writing in Canada.