Writer Development as Individual Maturity

In this theme, writer development is equal to maturity. It involves progress and mastery. Therefore, the concept of timeline is important to this theme because it affirms the potential growth, like a flower which blooms under the right circumstances. This theme of maturity encompasses the following concepts: trajectory, increase, perfection, distinction, and stage.

In terms of trajectory, one taxonomy for development in writing as proposed by Myhill (2009) includes three developmental trajectories: from speech patterns to writing patterns; from declaration to elaboration (of information); and from translation to transformation (of knowledge). These trajectories come with variables regarding sentence length, thematic variety, text output counts, clauses and syntactical structures. This taxonomy has been applied with secondary pupils and results in a model of linguistic development of the sentence in relation to age and level of writing achievement (Myhill, 2008). In terms of increase, it is easy to notice the differences between two levels of writers or between two groups of writers through linguistic evidence through contrastive rhetoric device called ‘metadiscourse’. It has been noticed that doctoral students use more metadiscourse items in comparison to Master’s

students as shown in Table 2.7, signalling an increased engagement with their readers (Hyland & Tse, 2004).

Table 2.7 A metadiscourse comparison between theses written by Masters’ and Doctoral students (N.B. metadiscourse items per 10,000 words) (Hyland & Tse, 2004, p. 170)

Likewise, it is noted that English writers use more ‘we’ such as ‘as we have seen’ in the closing section of academic papers to interact with their readers whereas their Swedish counterparts almost never do so (Ädel, 2006). Another recent study also shows that expert writers use more citations than novice writers and that experts tend to cite many sources in the same parentheses whereas novices tend to use citations in isolation (Mansourizadeh & Ahmad, 2011). In terms of perfection, Bourdieu (1991) remarks that people from different social classes use language as their symbolic tools differently. Those who are in the middle class are prone to hypercorrection or perfectionism because their linguistic habitus is to achieve the legitimate competence, which is gained through symbolic capital. Dressen-Hammouda (2008) has shown that novice writers draw on shared symbolic cues (such as lexis and syntactical structures) to portray themselves as a disciplinary expert as they acquire genre mastery. In terms of distinction, it might be identified with uniqueness in writing style. Hyland’s (2010) textual analysis of publications by John M. Swales and Deborah Cameron suggests that each author has their own distinctive sets of word clusters they prefer to use in their writing. Therefore, it has been argued that both authors have their own distinctive rhetorical identity and that this distinction seems to be an individual property.

In terms of stage, there is a classic understanding of skill development in five following stages as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986): novice, advanced beginner, competent user, proficient user and expert. Their framework has been largely used in professional contexts with pilots, engineers and nursing practitioners to argue for the fact that novices are in the realm of pure rules whereas experts are totally immersed in their work. To illustrate the case of airplane pilots, ‘as beginners they felt that they were flying their planes but as experienced pilots they simply experience flying itself’ (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 30). In the context of literacy and writing skills, Carter (1990) adopts Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ five stages model and suggests that two kinds of knowledge—general and local—play a role in the development of writing expertise. He contends that within the first three stages of development— novice, advanced beginner and competency—writers rely on knowledge of global strategies to write in different domains. By contrast, writers in the two uppermost stages of development—proficiency and expertise—have acquired the local knowledge of a particular domain to help them write because as writers ‘continue to work in a domain, their knowledge becomes more local as their experience grows and their domain becomes more specific’ (p. 282). In other words, experts are more specific and more local than beginners.

It seems that Carter’s contention that expert writers display both specificity and locality of domain is debatable among academic scholars, especially in the domain of science (e.g., Emerson, 2012; Yore, Hand, & Florence, 2004; Yore, Hand, & Prain, 2002). Studies by Yore and his colleagues support Carter’s argument as they found that the scientist writers in their study

target their writing to a few journals that they also read regularly, use writing in their teaching and scholarship to inform and persuade science students and other scientists, but do little border crossing into other discourse communities. … [T]hese scientists perceived writing as knowledge telling not knowledge building, their metacognition of written discourse was tacit, and they used a narrow array of genre, strategies, target audiences, and expectations for their writing. (Yore et al., 2002, p. 672)

However, Emerson’s (2012) study gives a different picture of expert scientist writers who are not narrowly focused in terms of audience and task, as

contended by Carter and depicted by Yore and his colleagues. The academic science writers in her study engage in a wider domain of scholarship and work with a broader focus as they become senior. One of the academic scholars also proposes:

the idea of the “lifecycle” of scientific writers, postulating that scientific writers go through several stages in the types of writing they engage with post-PhD and that the final stage involves a more expansive view of science which leads to a perceived need to bring science into a broader arena for various publics. (Emerson, 2012, p. 368)

Therefore, it is still unclear whether writers will become more narrowly focused or broadly engaging as they become more experienced in their academic literacies and more involved in their academic communities. This theme of writer development mainly provides an account of how individual writers develop to their full potential. However, it seems to set the finish line to the development, for example, writers begin as novices and end as experts. Moreover, it suggests that the apotheosis can be reached even though that means no more progress, like the term ‘final stage’. Linguistically, this apotheosis might emerge as the unique style of writing as part of the authorial identity, as in the case of John M. Swales for collegiality and Deborah Cameron for radical personality. Another criticism of this theme is that it does not seem to explicitly acknowledge the participation or the interaction between writers and their community, namely the influence which other members may have on the writers’ pathway of progression. For example, how can doctoral students use a higher frequency of metadiscourse markers than Master’s students? Do they just mature into more competent writers as they move on to do a PhD? Or is their changing pattern of use informed by interactions with their discourse community? Therefore, another conception of writer development is needed.