Question

Cognitive Psychology: Applying The Science of the Mind (4th Edition)
Chapter 10

Discussion Question:
What do you think is the most important factor in communicating through your writing? Think of the comments you get from professors, or the problems you seem to have in writing. Do they map onto any of the factors you've read about?

Here's an example of one of my classmate response....
I feel that with writing being such a common way of communicating it is important to be as proficient as possible. To be able to do so it truly helps to understand the processes involved. After understanding the processes, you can come to utilize them within your writing to communicate effectively. For example, the word skipping issue in reading is something that also affects my writing. Word skipping is one of the biggest problems I have in reading and writing. Like stated in the textbook, short words such as “an” and “the” are more likely to be skipped. When writing sometimes I will repeat short words without even realizing it. When proofreading my writing to uncover mistakes like that I will just skip right over them without even realizing it and the mistake remains in my writing. One of my English teachers advised me to read through my writing backwards because this would ensure that I read it word per word and would likely not skip over any words. This advice helped me with detecting repeated short words that I usually skipped over.

Answer 1

An important factor to be considered while communicating through writing is maintaining a clear structure while writing, which is simple, so that the reader does not get confused while reading it.

Often while writing, people may tend to lose grip over their own write up. They may start with something and end up on an entirely different note. While this pattern might be interesting for some forms of stories, however, professional communication gets hampered with such a structure. The readers find it difficult to connect the dots and therefore lose out on the meaning of the text.

Therefore, it could be advised that while writing, a person should keep revising the content that is being written. This will help the writer not lose link while writing and continue with a flow. Also making a mind map before writing would help in maintaining the goal of the write up till the end and not lose track half way.