2025 Volume 19 Issue 2 Pages 173-190
How do people construct the content and rhetorics of a text when they face a new writing situation? A limited number of studies have been done in Japan that investigates the effective way to write or to teach how to write when writers face a new situation. A three-year longitudinal study was conducted where ten graduate students were interviewed about writing different kinds of academic pieces or texts in their workplaces. The analysis, conducted by utilizing Modified Grounded Theory Approach, indicated that the decision-making process that the students went through involved the awareness towards the readers’ standpoint and purpose of reading the text, and the writers’ own standpoint and roles. They also actively studied the characteristics of the kinds of texts they were to write, or proactively set up certain environments to brush up their texts. Their own beliefs about what constitutes a good text influenced their writing as well. These findings indicate that it is crucial to guide students to analyze their readers and their own standpoints when writing in a new situation. The use of meta-cognition may be effective in the later stages of writing when the writers need to assess their writing.
