ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 I showed how the children’s control over their work consisted in their ability actively to interpret and reinterpret it. In this way they gave meaning to it which ensured that its structure became more clearly ordered and that new perspectives on it emerged. In the last chapter I showed how part of this attempt by the children required them to stand back from their immediate experience and to abstract from it. They grappled not only with the direct experience itself but also with the rules, hypotheses and systems they invented to explain it. What I now want to explore is the role that writing plays in this process.
