2005 Volume 53 Issue 1 Pages 62-73
The present study examined the effect of limiting the length of a passage of expository text writing on the selection and organization of ideas in the passage. Undergraduate and graduate students (3 men, 42 women, average age 21.42 years) were asked to use material they were given as the basis for writing about Mauritania (the African country) as if they were explaining about the country to a friend who was not familiar with it. Subjects were divided into 3 groups: (1) limited to 200 characters (roughly the equivalent of 75 English words),(2) limited to 400 characters (approximately 150 English words), and (3) unlimited. The results showed that students in the 200-character group wrote about fewer important points than did those in the 400-character and unlimited groups. Although they used fewer characters to explain those ideas than the unlimited group did, the proportion of important ideas that they selected was larger than that selected by the unlimited group. Furthermore, the participants in the 200-character group worked harder to select, delete, and organize ideas. These results suggest that being limited to using fewer characters promoted students' selection and organization of ideas.
