Process Analysis: To What Extent Do Psycho, Socio and Techno Theories Explain My Writing Practice

Introduction of the essay: The process analysis is to bring theory to bear on data. This means explanatory power of theory is measured on the data. Its weakness is also revealed.

Genre stages: excavation^analysis^transformation.

Language features: excavation-authorial presence; Analysis+transformation-strong author presence.

Audience :instructor +peers.

This essay demonstrates the different extents that psycho, socio and techno theories explain my academic and personal writing practice. It is written in my sophomore year.

Introduction

The globalization of education is now a feature of 21st-century development. English, as a Lingua Franca, has facilitated the rise of international students who travel abroad seeking degrees in English. It has also spread English universities from their traditional ‘English speaking’ domains to non-traditional, or non-English speaking, countries. Indeed, in countries like China, there has been an increase of universities with English as a medium of instruction (EMIs) such as Nottingham, Liverpool, New York, Duke, and Kean. These Universities use English as a medium of instruction (EMI) and where writing is the most important skill that students need to master. It is writing, not so much speaking, that is the high stake skill that students need to master in order to earn their degrees. However, writing in the academic context is a huge challenge to most students for a number of reasons. First, the nature of academic vocabulary requires the mastery of uncommon or specialized and technicalised language. Hence, its acquisition is not an easy task for students particularly, second language learners of English. Second, the variety and numbers of genres or text types that students need to produce make writing doubly difficult even for native speakers of English. Third, students need to close the huge gaps between their previous writing experiences from high-school and the University’s expectations. Most students write single paragraphs in high school but university writing often begins with five-paragraph essays and the number of paragraphs increases exponentially yearly. Students are required to do research and engage with their discipline’s theoretical concepts, methods, and data and evaluate ideas in disciplinary valued ways in writing. Therefore, it can be argued that writing is the most challenging aspect of higher education for both the native and non-native writers of English. It is often the case that students are overwhelmed by their writing requirements and are not given time to pause and reflect on their writing practices and how theory might inform and improve their writing. This is the central issue in this essay.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze to what extent do psycho, socio and techno theories explain my writing practice. I find the three theories can interpret my academic, personal and professional writing practice to a large extent. In the essay, I will summarise the essential points in three theory at the beginning. Then I will analyze my academic, personal, and professional writing practice according to three theories. After that, I will analyze the transformation by three dimensions of my writing and make a conclusion.

Writing Theories

Psycho Theory

Psycho theory views writing as an individual cognitive activity. In A Teacher Teaches Writing, Murray (2004) proposes that purpose of writing is discovery. He proposes also a writing process to include collecting information, drafting, revising and editing. Revising, as an essential part of writing, is a way to develop or improve a draft through self-reading, peer review or feedback from instructors. In Murray (2004)’s own experience, revising is vital to most of the writers, especially “inexperienced writers or experienced writers dealing with a new subject, a new audience or new genre, writing is indeed rewriting” (Murray, 2004, p.56). He suggests students should understand that rewriting is a chance instead of a penalty because they can get unexpected cognition in the rewriting (Murray, 2004).

Socio Theory

Socio theory views writing as a social activity. Gee (1989) states that writing is a Discourse which combines saying-doing-being-valuing-believing. It means writing is a sort of enculturation supported by indicated customs and instructions of acting. He also suggests the way to acquire Discourses is social practice. If a writer does not access to social practice, he or she is not in Discourses. It is to say, a writer cannot learn his native language (the first Discourse), and the advanced Discourse only by classes. A writer is supposed to participate in the society and got a specific identity of members of the social institution so that he or she can get the opportunity to engage in social Discourses and put them in writing.

In a similar view, Hyland (2004) proposes similar ideas. He offers a new insight of writing and suggests that “…the genre-based writing instruction offers students an explicit understanding of how target texts are structured and why they are written in the ways they are.” (Hyland, 2003a, p.153). It means, compared with the traditional learning of writing, the knowledge of genre can help students understand the purpose and the function of writing. Hyland (2004) observes that a writer, who thoroughly understand the genre of writing, can figure out the certain value and expectation in their writing.

Moreover, McCool (2009) states in Writing around the World that culture is the main and vital issue in writing. “Cultures with stronger low context forms of communication tend to approach language from a functional perspective.” (McCool, 2009, c. 3.2). That is to say, writing is to emphasize the content and function of a language rather than the form of it and the relationship between meanings words, and sentences in the language should be focused. Many low context cultures or language is applied as a channel to express information while many high context cultures tend to be used ambiguously and aesthetically.

Techno Theory

Techno theory asserts that writing is a technology that restructures thought. Walter Ong suggests that writing is an artificial tool. “Writing is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials.” (Ong, 1986, p.32). It means that writing differs from an oral speech and it stands in a higher literature cultures. It is ruled by “consciously contrived, articulated procedures.” (Ong, 1986, p.33). Thereby, writing has a value of reflecting the human consciousness and humanity.

Analysis

This analysis will examine two types of writing: my academic and personal writing. Since I have not done much professional writing yet, I will not do any analysis of my professional writing. Next, I will analyze four of my academic writing- Observation Report, Summary and Response, Translation, and Argumentative Essay, For my personal writing that I do every day, my Letters Writing with friends and my Diary Writing will be analyzed.

Academic Writing

Socio theory has a considerable explanatory power to my academic writing practice. My Linguistics Observation Report in my ENG3010 is a social practice as Gee (1989) suggests. First, for a few reasons, social practice played an important role when I was required to write the Observation Report of babies between six months old to four years old. According to the phonetic and morphology of linguistics, I decided to focus on babies sounds and words. Because I did not have any friends or relatives who are at required ages, I found it hard to acquire primary sources. At the beginning, I planned to get information from the Internet or recording videos, but the idea was rejected by Prof. Chiang. He strongly suggested me to touch a real baby. It is a way to put myself into social practice that I can get Discourses in my writing. Hence, I took a day to stay in KFC near my home only to talk with different babies (It made me like a mischievous baby trafficker). Through the dialogue with babies, I made new discoveries of babies’ sound and expression, which I could not get online. For example, a three-year-old baby liked to follow my words. When I said “What’s your name?” he would repeat the sentence. It was the way that he learned new words and phrases from others. I integrated the observation into my report that was a great interpretation of phonetic and morphology. The social practice enriched my Observation Report and tightly connected my Observation Report with the outside world. As Gee (1989) asserts, an excellent writer is a member of a society that he can have channels to get social Discourse. Through Discourses I acquired in the social practice, my writing became a channel to communicate and express information to my readers. In other words, I successfully reached the writing purpose of my Observation Report. That is why the socio theory can explain my Observation Report to a large extent.

In addition, another academic writing practice can dramatically show the explanatory power of Hyland (2004)’s theory. Genre writing, as Hyland (2004) refers to, is required in all my English writing courses. I found learning genre is a useful approach to understanding the purpose of writing. In my ESL0305 and ENG2101 courses, I wrote Summary and Response Paper. I still remember the first time I wrote summary and response to a journal article entitled “Reading for Academic Purposes”. However, I thought it useless because I believed summary was a repeating of others’ words, so I paraphrased all contents of the article. It was an apparently wrong perspective. After one-year training, I learned summary and response was a sort of wildly-used genre that can be adopted in many writings. For example, when I wrote the process analysis, I summarized three theories and wrote my reflection on them so that I can show the extent they matched each other. In further explanation, I gradually understood the function and purpose of summary and response paper. A summary is to bring up main or vital points in an article or book that we want a reader to pay attention. Likewise, a response is to show own experience or opinions of the points and understanding of the things we read. Therefore, a summary and response paper is a combination of reading, writing, and understanding. It is a communication between writers. In this case, I can write an effective summary and response paper. Therefore, I found Hyland’s genre theory convincing, and it is tightly related to my academic writing practice.

Furthermore, my academic translation practice is a kind of cultural communication in writing, as McCool (2009) states in his theory. He suggests high context cultures and low context cultures have a different function. I am consistent with the perspective. I took GLOB3805 Translation by Gary Linebarger this semester. I found a completely different between Chinese and English writing. For example, my first translation assignment was to translate a Chinese recipe into English. Chinese is a high context language while English is a low context language. The translation is a writing that needs us to figure out the differences between two context language and culture. In the process of translation, I found English usually began with verb straightforwardly while Chinese likes to give an elaborate description or explanation of the direction in the recipe. Therefore, the function of English tends to be a direct information channel and Chinese is used in as a rhetorical method. It is a perfect proof of the fundamental difference between Chinese and English. That is why I think McCool’s perspective significant.

However, the psycho theory explains my Argumentative Essay to a small extent. My Argumentative Essay in 1430 course, for example, went through several rewriting. I nearly rewrote my essays for five times because it was my first time to write the Argumentative Essay about the US students’ debt loan. The first draft was entirely denied by Prof. H. because the whole essay was disordered and illogical. I attempted to follow a sample essay to finish my second and third draft. However, those drafts still got low grades because my viewpoints were hard to be followed. The three failed writings forced me to identify my weakness of writing the Argumentative Essay and I decided to change my approach. I discussed my confusion with Prof. H. After a long-time talking, I understood my drawback. It was because I did not know how to build an explicit thesis statement and apply relevant evidence to support it so that my argument is not convincing and rational. My Argumentative Essay is a social activity rather than an individual activity. Hence, psycho theory hardly explains my Argumentative Essay.

Personal Writing

My personal writing practice also can be explained by socio theory. It is writing letters mutually. When I graduated from high school and was separated with my friends, I began to write letters to them. Although there are many social media to contact, my friends and I believed writing letters was a more meaningful way to express our feelings. We sent letters or postcards in every festival, like Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival or the April Fool Festival. We wrote our study, life, emotions and some gossip. We recorded the exciting moments of our lives and shared them with each other. As Gee said, discourse is a combination of saying, doing, valuing and believing (Gee, 1989). Although we were in different cities, different colleges and different situations, we used letters to exchange the various belief or thoughts. It was a kind of discourse that we communicated through texts.

As for techno theory, one of my personal writing practice is close to Ong’s theory. I started to write a diary in the third year of my high school. It was a time that I suffered the massive pressure of study. I hid negative emotions and secrets in my heart, but I wanted to find the way to speak out. Thus, I used writing as a technology to record my thoughts and sentiments. Here is an excerpt from my diary:

“Jan. 20, 2016. Cloudy.

After the first practice exam, I lost my hope. I got a total failure and I do not know how to move on. But I should persevere and keep my dream.”

It revealed a mix emotion of me at that time. When I reread my diary, I could find a struggling of my thoughts, a reversal of my feelings and various senses towards what I have experienced. There were some details I would have forgotten, but they were noted in my diary. They were my treasure that witnessed the change of mind. Hence, Ong’s theory is the most powerful when he states that writing is a tool which can be adapted to value humans’ consciousness.

Transformation

In this segment, I consider my analysis of my writing changes the way I understand the purpose of writing, my creative ability and my enthusiasm as a writer.

First, my writing is social an activity and it shows a great connection to society. I begin to understand the purpose of writing. Writing is to express my thoughts and exchange information social readers. It is a communicative function of writing. Therefore, as a writer, I am supposed to dwell the social practice in my writing. On the opposite, since psycho theory explains my academic writing to a small extent, I should consider my writing as an individual activity as well. I used to overlook the importance of the process of writing. It led to a lack of self-cognitive process of my writing. As a writer, I should spend more time making a reflection of my past writing rather than relying on others’ instruction. It will help me improve the quality of writing. In my future writing, I need to consider the writing process and polish my writing individually.

Furthermore, Discourses, genre, and culture, as socio theory states, are important issues in my academic and personal writing. Through the Discourse, genre pedagogy, and cultural communication, my writing shows a tight connection between me and outside world. When I am writing, I usually combine the things I observed and my own thoughts together to make a new discovery. In other words, my writing is a process of producing and creating new things by integrating tradition and innovation. It shows my creative ability. However, since the psycho theory shows a low explanatory power to my writing, I should attempt to raise my creativity to a high level and deliver more excellent writing to my readers.

Last, the analysis raises my enthusiasm as a writer. Writing is an artificial tool to record conciseness and it motivates me to think and develop my intelligence. I enjoy the process of pondering. However, my writing is still trapped in a low level, which needs more critical and systematic thoughts. For a further development, I should dig out the deep thoughts for my writing and keep my enthusiasm as a writer all the time.

Conclusion

In a conclusion, psycho theory, socio theory, and techno theory can explain my academic and personal writing to a different extent. Socio theory shows a strong explanation power to my academic writing, including Observation Report, Summary and Response, Translation. On the opposite, psycho theory hardly explains my Argumentative Essay. As for my personal writing, socio theory can strongly explain my Letter Writing, and techno theory also can explain my Diary Writing to a great extent. That demonstrates a good development and evolution of my academic writing while my personal writing should have been explained by psycho theory well in some ways. The Analysis of my writing changes the way I understand the purpose of writing, my creative ability and my enthusiasm as a writer. However, that also shows a shortage of my individual writing process and the integration of social practice and cognitive practice. It is the goal I should achieve in the future.

References

Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and Linguisitics introduction. Journal of Education, 5-17.

Hyland, K. (2004). Genre Pedagogy: Language, Literacy and L2 Writing Instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 148-164.

McCool, M. (2009). Writing Around the World: A Guide to Writing Across Cultures. Michigan: Continuum.

Murray, D. M. (2004). "A Writer Teaches Writing". Boston: Heinle.

Ong, W. J. (1986). Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought. In G. Baumann, The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (pp. 23-50). New York: Wolfson College.