Skrivprocesser på högskolan. Text, plats och materialitet i uppsatsskrivandet

Abstract in English

The purpose of this study is to explore how students in a higher education context handle the writing of their final essay. Applying a sociomaterial approach, the study offers comprehensive case studies of students’ writing processes. The thesis attempts to show how student writers handle writing challenges through different technologies and at different places. It does so by implementing the Mobile Technologies Process Logs (MTPL)-method, wherein participating students take an active role to create and gather data on their own writing processes.

The results show that some students’ textual work could be described in terms of being comprehensive, and hence handled through varied writing technologies at various writing places. These students write a lot of texts to move the writing process forward. Other writers take a more product-oriented view in their writing, and hence write through fewer technologies, at a few places, and with a wish to finish their final text product directly. Many of the students make explicit how they process the literature through writing texts. The knowledge production, the analysis, which is central to academic writing, seems however more implicit and difficult for the students to handle, specifically if having a product oriented view on writing. The results also show how students mobilize different textual actions to meet challenges that writing an (digital) essay implies. This work is clearly emplaced ,at diverse or at more homogenous writing places.

It is significant to make textual strategies as well as the functions of writing technologies and place visible to all students. It seems vital at times where higher education, as well as the students entering this institution, are put in front of a raft of (new) challenges. At the same time as the idea of the bad student writer is prevailing, higher education institutions seem not to teach how an academic writing process could be managed in successful ways. This thesis contributes to this field of inquiry with results on how students’ writing processes can be characterized.