Being able to keep more in working memory is essential to fluent and accurate performance. Accuracy is self-evident but people rarely think about fluency. Fluency means that you can perform the action quickly enough not to get stuck and loose track of what you’re trying to do.
We most often talk about fluency when it comes to speaking a language. When we say ‘She is fluent in Swahili’ we mean that she can have a conversation with someone without constantly stopping and thinking about how to say something. Everybody who’s tried to learn a second language knows what it feels like when you don’t have enough fluency. You feel like a fool because you can never say what you want when you most need it.
But fluency is very important to any performance. Whether it is speaking, writing, reading, playing a musical instrument, driving or even editing, you need to be able to do it quickly enough to get where you are going.
<aside> 💡 When you practice, your aim should be to develop fluency first and accuracy second.
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One of the more well-known learning difficulties that causes problems with reading and writing is dyslexia. This is often thought about as misspelling words. But most people do not realise that by far the biggest impact of dyslexia is on fluency.
In fact, dyslexia is defined as a phonological processing limitation that causes problems with “fluent and accurate reading and writing”. What this means is that a dyslexic reader or writer will be so slow in decoding individual words that by the time they get to the end of the sentence, they don’t know what it’s about. And working memory deficit is one of the most common issues people with dyslexia face.
Dyslexia is a neurological feature but even people without dyslexia feel similar effects when they are in a situation when their working memory is put under stress. In other words, their ability to write or read fluently is diminished and often their accuracy suffers, as well. There are many things that put stress on your working memory but speaking or reading in a foreign language would come top of the list. And for most people ‘academic writing’ often feels like a foreign language.
It would be a mistake to think of fluent performance as not having to think about what we’re doing. Many people have heard of the four stages of competence model (Four stages of competence model) in which you progress through these four stages when developing any skill:
This is a useful guide to thinking about the process of learning but there is a great danger of misinterpreting the final stage as being ‘so good at something’ we can do it without thinking about it. In fact, the original author warned against this very stage as being a symptom that people will stop improving.
The final stage of competence will feel like you can do something without paying conscious attention but that’s only because your working memory is not being constantly swamped. But the aim should not be to be able to do something without thinking but to but to be able to do it because we can think with bigger chunks.
The chunks in your working memory are not closed off blocks, they have internal structure and being able to bring this structure out is essential when encountering a new situation or when something goes wrong. An expert performer must not only be able to something but also to notice problems and recover from them. A musician may play a wrong note, an actor may have to respond to a disruption from the audience, a driver may have to deal with a non-responsive break. Dealing with all of those situations requires being able to take apart and recombine the chunks at high speed.
This is extremely relevant to academic writing because it is important for a writer to not just string together chunks academic-sounding language but also to say something with it. In fact, academic writers have to paraphrase what others are saying. They also have to be able to edit what they wrote which again requires conscious attention. Writing requires thinking, but thinking fluently.