Writing Motivation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Writing motivation is the motivational drive to write. It is framed with one’s appraisal of relationship between writing activity and writing outcome.Writing involves memory retrieval, goal setting, planning, problem solving and evaluation. Motivation to write occurs at three levels:
(a) Specific level – focusing on the processes between goal setting and writing sentences;
(b) Intermediate level – focusing on the processes between goal setting and writing sentences;
(c) General level – focusing on overall structure of a piece of writing;
Like Reading Motivation, individual likes to write for own (intrinsic writing motivation) and for other’s (extrinsic writing motivation) sake. Intrinsic writing motivation includes documentation (desire to make archive), emotional expression (desire to express emotions), creativity (desire to satisfy creation urge) and achievement (desire to improve writing competency) motives. And extrinsic writing motivation includes Affiliation (desire to write in order to be loved by others), Recognition (desire to write in order to be recognized by others), and Harm avoidance (desire to write in order to avoid punishment) motives.
[edit] Strategies
(a) Improve eye-hand coordination in writing following writing skills, e.g. , clockwise and anti clockwise circling, angular writing, keeping symmetry and inter word spacing. (b) Improve key processes of writing as :
Planning : Generate ideas and organize them into writing plan to satisfy writer’s goals;
Sentence-generation process : Turning the writing plan into the actual writing of sentences;
Revision process : Evaluating what has been written;
In planning stage, writer organizes main goals and sub goals of writing to form a coherent writing plan. Good writer uses strategic knowledge in a flexible way. Structure of writing plan often changes during the writing period as new ideas come to the writer, or dissatisfaction grows with the original writing plan. If the plan proves inadequate, then the writing process grinds to a halt. The greatest difference between experts and non experts was in plan integration : experts goals were much better integrated. Two major strategies are used in the planning stage: the knowledge-telling strategy (writing down everything he or she knows about a topic) and the knowledge transferring strategy (asking questions about the writing goals, e.g., can the main ideas be expressed more simply ?). Writers using a knowledge transferring strategy should produce more organized texts than those produced by using a knowledge telling strategy. Well organized texts contain high-level main points that describe important themes. After planning and sentence generation, good writer spends time in revising so that the ideas become clearer, coherent and well argued. Expert writers detected about 60% more problems in a text than did non-experts.
( c ) Change from extrinsic to intrinsic writing motivation: Avoid extraneous reinforcement for writing. Do not do any thing so that child can relate that his writing performance is related to the outcome of praise, recognition and love of others. Rather develop his mind set so that child can relate the writing outcome with his level of changes in writing competency, in expressing emotions, making documents and in creative productions.
