Optimal Levels of Writing Management: A Re-Analysis of Boice (1983)

A second group did the same baseline condition as the first, scheduling five sessions per week but actually writing only when they felt like it for 15 scheduled days. After this time, for an additional 20 days, they were asked to write daily, whether they felt like writing or not, but no quota and no reinforcers were used.

A third group agreed to do no writing for 50 days or ten weeks and also kept track of any new, creative ideas they had.

For ease of exposition, I present Boice’s results in terms of four writing conditions. Conditions 2, 3 and 4 represent increasing amounts of management in writing.

1.	No writing: the control group.
2.	Spontaneous writing, writing when one "feels like it.": the baseline conditions for groups 1 and 2.
3.	Regular writing: the second phase activity of group 2, asked to do regular writing without incentives.
4.	Forced writing, those who had to send a donation to a despised organization if they did not meet their writing goals. This was the second phase activity of group 1.

Quantity written

Table 1
Amount of writing reported
no writing	.1 (control, baseline), .2 (control, post-baseline)
spontaneous	.4 (group 1, baseline), .3 (group 2, baseline)
regular	.9 (group 2, post-baseline)
forced writing	3.2 (group 1, post-baseline)

As seen in table 1, there is no question that tightening the writing management conditions resulted in more writing. Encouraging writers to write regularly tripled output (.3 to .9 pages per day) and imposing a punishment increased output eightfold (.4 to 3.2 pages per day).

Production of creative ideas

Boice presented his results on the quantity of novel ideas in the form of graphs. I converted the information contained in Boice’s summary graph (Boice’s figure 2) into actual numbers, measuring the output of creative ideas at each five day interval. Table 2 shows that writing itself resulted in more creative ideas (compare the "no writing" and "spontaneous" writing conditions), and that the number of creative ideas increases sharply with increased management, with punishment producing the largest increase.