The writing process begins with a decoding effort: students, who have already been working in the development of the oral language are asked to decode phonemes into graphemes. This is an essential activity in learning to write, although a vision that only encompasses this component is very reductive. Writing is, above all, a social process, thus it is highly complex, also abstract, and has many layers of proficiency. Several approaches to writing have been considered incomplete because it is extremely difficult to be able to map all the components of a social process and writing is no exception. In addition, writing in itself is an activity that requires several actions – it is a multilinear process – because the writer goes backwards and forwards in order to obtain the final form of the text. This multilinearity is transversal to the planning, textualization and revision of the text. Regarding the revision of the text, and once again according to the approach he/she uses, he can only focus on analyzing spelling or grammar, or he/she can take it to the next level and analyze if the text conveys the message that was idealized, in other words, if the text has the meaning the writer wants to. Concerning this, I find it really interesting the idea of collaborative reviewing recommended by Santana (Santana, 2007). In my opinion It is extremely valuable because it promotes a deeper reflection on the text and makes it more evident to realize if the meaning that the writer wants to convey through the message is the same, or very close to, the meaning that the reader makes of it.

(Flanagan,2018)

A very practical example of the subtlety of written language are the texts of counting problems in probabilities (Mathematics). My experience as a teacher tells me that the overwhelming majority of students who get the exercises wrong, get them wrong due to the inability to correctly interpret the message of the text. Small subtleties in the text determine whether the order of an event matters or not, and on that basis students have to use different mathematical concepts to solve the exercise. This problem is even more serious because it is common among high school students. I think that the strategy of collaborative reviewing of texts, applied since the first years of school could minimize this deficiency among high school students. I say this because it is a process that allows to easily spot it the meaning of the writer’s message is the same as the reader’s. I haven’t done any study regarding the correlation of the two things yet, but I consider it would be an excellent topic to study.

References:

Santana, Inácia (2007). A aprendizagem da escrita. Estudo sobre a revisão cooperada de texto. Colecção Infância. Porto editora

Flanagan, Mike (2018). Retrieved from URL https://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/t/text_language.asp