Interactions - March/April 2013

ory depends on the availability of sufficient resources within the limited capacity of working memory.” 2) Novice writers with the lack of task schema in long-term memory resources may “frequently focus on retrieving relevant content rather than developing conceptual plans.” 3) Working memory constraints can affect “the development and functional use of global planning,” “the structural complexity of texts,” and “reading texts critically in a macrostructure of the text level” [ 7]. The structure of a text is something that needs to be made; thus, it exists as indeterminate and needs to expand. But it should present a logical order for the argument.

I argue that MS Word, with respect to all those needs, presents novice writers with one simple structure, while ignoring spatial and mediated activities. The theoretical background for the need for tools based on spatial activity comes from the embodied nature of abstract reasoning. George Lakoff explains metaphorical extensions of bodily movements to abstract domains as follows: “Schemas that structure our bodily experience preconceptually have a basic logic. Preconceptual structural correlations in experience motivate metaphors that map that logic onto abstract domains. Thus, what has been called abstract reason has a bodily basis in our everyday physical functioning” [ 8].

Among bodily schemas, for
example, the configuration of a
baby in his mother’s arms is a
container schema, which is used
to describe a certain conceptual
category. The whole configura-
tion of the relationship between
the baby and the mother con-
sists of a gestalt structure. But
we don’t think usually that our
spatial, bodily activity is related
to abstract reasoning; spatial
image schemas based on bodily
movements such as part-whole
relations and cycle image sche-
mas structure our understand-
ing and organize thought.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Meredith Davis, Martha Scotford, Christopher Martin Anson, Christopher B. Mayhorn, and Erik Stolterman for providing me with advice, references, and feedback. I thank the writers in the study for sharing the writing process with me.

ENDNOTES:

1. Vygotsky, L.S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman, eds. Harvard University Press, 1978, 55. 2. Vygotsky, L. and Luria, A. Tool and symbol in child development. In The Vygotsky Reader. R. Van der Veer and J. Valsiner, eds. Blackwell Publishers, 1994, 145. 3. Ibid., 266. 4. Leontiev, A. A. Psychology and the Language Learning Process. C.V. James, ed. Pergamon Press, 1981, 14. 5. See 1., 54-55. The order of sentences was slightly changed from the original source. 6. Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala Publications, Boston, MA, 1998, 138. 7. McCutchen, D., Teske, P., and Bankston, C. Writing and cognition: Implications of the cognitive architecture for learning to write and writing to learn. In Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. C. Bazerman, ed. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008, 447-465. 8. Lakoff, G. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987, 278.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joohee Huh received a Ph.D. in
design at North Carolina State
University in the College of
Design. Her dissertation topic was
the dynamic interplay between
spatialization of written units in
writing activity and functions of tools on the comput-
er. Her research interests include embodied imagi-
nation, creativity, learning environments, and writing.