They also spend little time planning and start off writing although they are still confused about the task (Richards, 1990). Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986) said that they use the trial-and-error approach to trigger more writing (if they get stuck in their writing, they will just start all over again using another word in the topic that they can relate to and tell about). Novice writers do not have the propensity to plan paragraphs or essays as a whole formally or informally (Stallard, 1974).

Research provides a profile of the novice writers to help us understand how they approach the writing task and how we could help them overcome the problem. These 'novice' writers adopt different writing strategies as opposed to expert writers. Many university students write incomprehensibly. The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability to write.

Thus, tree diagrams can be used as a planning and diagnostic tool to help students improve the coherence of their writing. Tree diagrams help students to see the hierarchy of their ideas and how their ideas are related to one another. This may be because they do not have a mental representation of their writing. They tend to to be more concerned with language matters rather than making meaning. Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) Journal Seeing is Understanding: Improving Coherence in Students' Writing

Samples for coherence writing