Up: [[Thinking]] Created: 2023-06-27 MOVES is an acronym I’ve created for five characteristics of writing, each of which MOVES thought forward. ## Multiple Modes A general rule of thumb in learning is that the more processing you have to do, the better. It is one of the reasons that note-making is so superior to highlighting and underlining. Writing requires hand (enactive), eye (iconic, the graphic product), and brain (representing thought in words). Jerome Bruner, educational researcher, defined this as an inherently reinforcing cycle for learning. ## Organized With the possible exception of some stream of consciousness writing practices, most writing, even writing for yourself, is connective, based on conceptual groupings, and on structures such as compare and contrast, cause and effect, or argument. In other words, even if every note isn’t the full 7C’s, you are likely using many of them quite automatically. ## Visible Writing makes thought visible and concrete so that you can interact with it, play with it, modify it. The relative permanence of written words allows you to rethink and revise over an extended period of time, permitting you to make a fully worked out contribution. The development of that thought is also visible if you choose to keep your notes and revisions. This is one way to prove to students that writing is thinking. ## Explicit Writing isn’t just talk that has been written down. Talk leans on the environment for context. Writing has to be explicit. It’s one of the reasons an audience for writing is important, at least to kids in school. An audience reinforces that writing is always a dialogue and in any dialogue you have to make yourself clear — to the audience to whom the text is addressed and within yourself as you are silently dialoguing with the text that is emerging. ## Slower This characteristic is often referred to in the literature as self-paced, but I’m going with what happens with that self-pacing which is that writing is always slower than speech, especially if you think of writing as organizing thought not just producing it. Slower facilitates a more reflective and self-critical stance. You’re constantly moving among past, present and future, and between analysis, where you break thoughts into parts, and synthesis, where you recombine them in new ways. See also [[Quotes - Writing is Thinking]]