Cognition and composition: Deliberate practice in a first-year composition course

Abstract

Drain from the invisible demands writing makes on writers’ brains may be lowering students’ self-efficacy. Deliberate practice, as developed by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, is a way to make those demands visible and to work toward a positive result. Deliberate practice is especially well suited to composition, given the large overlap between the two fields. A core component of deliberate practice is training the brain to automate parts of the writing process, to free up as much limited short-term memory as possible. Doing so minimizes the cognitive demands of writing, which, in turn, raises students’ self-efficacy. After reviewing the theory, this thesis proposes a potential first-year writing course based on deliberate practice.