The psychologist as wordsmith: a questionnaire study of the writing strategies of productive British psychologists

Abstract

Eighty-eight productive British psychologists completed a questionnaire on their writing habits and on their attitudes to and feelings about academic writing. The data were analysed in three ways. Firstly, an overall descriptive profile of the ‘average’ productive writer was drawn up by examining the most frequent responses to individual items on the questionnaire. Secondly, cluster analyses were carried out to determine if there were groups of productive individuals who set about their writing in distinctive ways. These analyses revealed groups of writers who could be distinguished in terms of their styles of composition (labelled ‘thinkers’ versus ‘doers’) and in terms of their attitudes and feelings (labelled ‘anxious’ versus ‘enthusiastic’). Thirdly, step-wise regression was used to isolate correlates of higher productivity for different products - books, book chapters and papers. The results suggested that different writing patterns accompanied the production of these different products. The highly productive writers of books were less likely to claim to be sporadic writers, and more likely to claim that they did sections of their writing in a single draft. The highly productive writers of chapters were more likely to be responding to commissions to write for an editor or colleague and their writing was aided a good deal by secretarial provision. The highly productive writers of papers did not always enjoy expressing what they wanted to say as much as their less productive colleagues, but they felt that their writing was very important to them. These findings are discussed in relation to research on academic writing in other disciplines, and the paper concludes with some prescriptive advice to authors should they wish to increase their productivity.