Writing motivation
Writing motivation is one's activation or energizing to give more effort to writing activity. It focuses on one’s appraisal of the relationship between writing activity and writing outcome. Like reading motivation Writing motivation is said to be intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic writing motivation comes from within. It includes one's desire to make archive (documentation), to express emotions (emotional expression), to satisfy creation urge (creativity) and to develop mastery over writing (achievement). Extrinsic writing motivation is for satisfying others. It includes one's desire to write to be loved (affiliation), to be recognized by others (recognition) and to avoid punishment. Writing activity includes memory retrieval, goal setting, planning, problem solving and evaluation.
Levels of Motivation
Motivation to write occurs at three levels:
- Specific level – focusing on the processes between goal setting and writing sentences;
- Intermediate level – focusing on the processes between goal setting and writing scenes;
- General level – focusing on overall structure of a piece of writing;
Strategies
Improve hand-eye coordination
Improve hand-eye coordination in writing following writing skills, e.g., clockwise and anti clockwise circling, angular writing, keeping symmetry and inter word spacing.
Improve key processes
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 the planning stage, the writer organizes main goals and sub goals of writing to form a coherent writing plan. A good writer uses strategic knowledge in a flexible way. The 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 is 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, a 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.
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.