Writing Development in the College Years: By Whose Definition?.

Abstract

Drawing upon their longitudinal study of four undergraduate writers and focusing on the progress of one of them, the authors question assumptions that confuse skills assessment with the measurement of academic and personal development. They argue for a broader view of writing development and a teaching approach that fosters it. R ecent years have seen the publication of longitudinal studies of writing, some of those studies explicitly linked to developmental theories. We're thinking, for instance, of Richard Haswell's Gaining Ground in College (1991), Marilyn Sternglass's Time to Know Them (1997), and Anne Beaufort's Writing in the Real World (1999). In 2000, we also published a longitudinal study that used the word development in its title: Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College. Although we use this word, we did not situate the study in relation to developmental scholarship on writing or cognition. That was neither our purpose nor study design. Given that we focused on four individual students-not large numbers, as did Haswell and Sternglass