Why did they Write?

Abstract

The question of motivation — why people wrote — is important in interpreting their resulting texts, but it is also extremely difficult to answer. Two levels or stages of motivation also require consideration, the first underlying the decision to keep some form of contemporaneous record and the second prompting the writing of a retrospective account. This divides the writers into three groups: those who only kept diaristic records, those who kept such records and later made a further decision to write them up into more shaped accounts, and those who wrote such accounts from memory only. These groups correspond to those identified on the basis of time of writing in Chapter 2.