Activation des processus rédactionnels et qualité des textes

Abstract

The relations between the processes of planning and revision and quality of texts produced by adults are explored by referring to experiments using various methods (guidance of the activity, drafts analyses, cognitive effort tasks) and starting from three questions. The first one relates to the impact of these two processes on text quality: Is it necessary to plan and to revise in order to write good texts? The second question relates to the implementation of these processes: how to help writers in better exploiting them during writing. The third question relates to the writers adjustment "to situate" their activity: Do they have ready-made solutions to produce certain types of texts and not others? If so, do they engage differently in the task? How do they coordinate these processes which allow a control by anticipation (planning) and a posteriori (revision). The main results show that (1) certain ways of planning and of revising are more effective than others and (2) depending on the writing context, writers must carry out tradeoffs between the implementation of the processes and their respective costs: They can use either planning or revision to reach comparable results. Finally, it remains difficult (1) to specify the linguistic dimensions that must be taken into account for assessing text quality and (2) to develop objective indexes which better account for the trade-offs between the cost of planning and of revision and the quality of the texts.