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Hi, I am John Hayes from
Carnegie Mellon University.
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Prof. Grabowski asked me
to talk about what I anticipated
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when Linda Flower and I rolled out
our model that is published in 1980.
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What did we think would happen?
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How will it be received?
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Would it be a big hit?
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Well, frankly, we really didn't know.
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We had no idea what was gonna happen.
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We liked the model,
but would other people like the model?
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We didn't know.
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Would they think it was too abstract and sciency,
or would they just be bored with it?
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Well, we couldn't tell.
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Part of the reason that we were in the dark,
and really had to be in the dark,
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was that some of the fields, where the model has been popular,
really didn't exist at the time.
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I'm thinking about fields like second language learning and information design.
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I think that the reason that the model was popular,
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was because it provided a language,
derived from cognitive science,
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that allowed people like teachers and researchers
to think about writing in ways they hadn’t before.
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But the language was, indeed, straight out of cognitive psychology
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and we didn't know whether people who weren't cognitive psychologists
would accept or be sensitive to such a language,
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the language of box and arrow models
and proposers and translators other things that we wrote on.
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Fortunately, people did respond positively
but we were quite uncertain whether that would occur.
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Now generally,
we think it's really hard for scientists to predict
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what the outcome of their work is gonna be held by the public.
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That certainly was the case for me.
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Let me just give an example of that to illustrate
some of the strange paths that researcher may take.
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I am gonna talk about,
some research I did with other researchers on voice in writing.
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Often when we read a text,
we get a feeling or an impression of the author or the author's personality.
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That is, whether they are warm or intelligent or condescending
and my question really was:
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"Did other people get that same impression
or does everybody have their own impression?"
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So, I put together a research team of myself and a couple of graduates,
and asked the question this way.
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We tried to approach the question,
by asking writing instructors, three different writing instructors,
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and we asked them to make personality judgments from students’ texts.
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And the texts were written by students
who were applying to Carnegie Mellon.
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They were writing essays,
personal essays that were intended to impress
the university that these were really magnificent people.
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So we knew that they were serious
and we knew what they were trying to do.
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And, so we asked the,
when we looked at the results of the personality judgments,
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we found that there was very significant agreement
among the judges,
among the three writing instructors.
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But something strange happened in the results:
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some students wrote essays that were perceived as negative.
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The personality of the students came across
as people you wouldn't like.
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And we wondered why in the world students would do that
when they were trying to impress.
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So, what we found was, in a second study,
in a follow up study, which we conducted with the same students,
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that is, the students who were applying and accepted at Carnegie Mellon university.
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We asked them to judge these same essays
and we found that they loved them.
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So what was happening apparently was
students were writing essays while they were in High School
and they were writing to High School norms.
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They would do things like load the essays up with fancy words.
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And when students read these essays,
they projected their personalities as intelligent and creative.
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But the writing instructors formed very different impression.
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Okay. We found that younger writers have trouble predicting
how their texts will be perceived by older readers.
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So Karen Schriver and I did a follow up study
in which we asked the reversed question:
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"Suppose you looked at adult writers who were writing to young readers,
how would young readers respond to those texts?”
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So we had a domain in which adult writers wrote to young people:
drug education literature.
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And what we did was to take drug education brochures written by adults, in general,
and asked the question:
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"How did young students, young students, teenagers respond to them?"
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And to be engaging, the older writers, the adult writers,
would use, what unfortunately was out of date slang in their writing.
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Students formed very negative impression.
In fact they would say things like:
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"He thinks, he is cool. But he is not."
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or
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"This is a writer who is an old white guy who never gets out of his office."
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So, the point here is that,
we hadn't, when we started this research, we had one question,
that question lead to other questions,
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we didn't know where things were going.
And that's not a surprise.
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So if you're a young student,
if you're a beginning researcher
and you are not sure where your research is going,
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that's the way it is.