ABSTRACT
This chapter sets forth an early version of the knowledge-telling model. The findings on which it was based have almost all been presented already in previous chapters. Thus, the model came about not from any particular new finding but from a sustained effort to make sense out of what had already been found. This effort, however, included not only studying the results of experimental studies but also studying several hundred thinking-aloud protocols from writers of different levels of skill. The guiding question was what tasks are these writers actually trying to accomplish and what uses are they making of their knowledge in order to accomplish those tasks? The realization that immature writers were using their knowledge in ways that left it little better integrated than it was before they committed it to text pointed to the larger problem that Chapter 7 addresses. This is the problem of the tendency of schooling to propagate “inert” knowledge—knowledge that is relatively inaccessible for any purpose other than stating it.
