Gisbert Keseling

Gisbert Keseling (born January 4, 1928 in Elze ) is a German linguist. He became known for his work on the analysis of writing processes and the writer's block .

Life

Keseling studied German, psychology and Scandinavian at the University of Göttingen . After receiving his doctorate in 1955, he worked for many years as a research assistant at the Lower Saxony Dictionary at the German Department of the University of Göttingen. In 1968 he completed his habilitation and immediately afterwards received a call to the Philipps University of Marburg , where he taught and researched in the field of German linguistics until his retirement in 1996.

Research priorities

With his scientific work, Keseling moves mainly in interdisciplinary border areas of linguistics. In particular, he made linguistic and conversational analytical knowledge useful for practical work, for example by educators and psychotherapists.

Keseling was particularly recognized for his work on analyzing the cognitive processes that take place when writing texts. On the basis of the observation that many of his students had considerable difficulties in drafting written work and that some threatened to fail despite good technical knowledge, Keseling investigated the question of what strategies experienced writers use to plan their texts and put them on paper, and how they work Differentiate strategies from those of students with writer's block. On the basis of his research he developed a text production model that he was able to refine on a long trip through the USA and Canada in exchange with colleagues there.

In 1993, Keseling founded the Marburg writing laboratory, one of the first in Germany. For years, the counseling sessions for students were recorded on tape and transcribed. The result was a typology of writer's block, which, according to Keseling, was predominantly caused by either an improper approach to planning a text or a poor relationship with the "addressee" presented, e.g. B. the assessing professor. For the elimination of the respective disorder, he developed a number of intervention strategies that have proven to be successful in practice.

His publications are now part of the basic literature for advisors at the numerous writing advice centers at German universities that have since emerged. As emeritus, he himself headed the Marburg writing laboratory for a few years, but after he left in 1999, it found no successor.

Publications (selection)

• Text patterns and sound structures as the basis of ratings when writing. In: Wolfgang Brandt (Ed.): Language in the past and present. Contributions from the Institute for German Linguistics at the Philipps University of Marburg. Marburg: Hitzeroth 1988, pp. 219-236
• Practical conversation analysis. A method for detecting and dealing with interaction disorders. In: Fiehler, Reinhard / Sucharowski, Wolfgang (Hrsg.): Communication consulting and communication training. Application fields of discourse research. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1992, 143-160
• Writing process and text structure, empirical research on the production of summaries. Tübingen: Niemeyer 1993, ISBN 3-484-31141-X
• Overcome writer's block. In: Norbert Frank, Joachim Stary (Hrsg.): The technique of scientific work. A practical guide. Paderborn u. a .: Schöningh 2003, pp. 197–222
• The writer's loneliness. How writer's block develops and can be successfully processed. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2004, ISBN 3-531-14169-4
• On the use of metaphors when talking about writing processes. In: Johannes Berning (Ed.): Text knowledge and writing awareness: contributions from research and practice. Berlin, Münster: LIT Verlag 2011, pp. 47–68

literature

• Manfred Kohrt, Arne Wrobel (ed.): Writing processes - writing products. Festschrift for Gisbert Keseling . Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag 1992

Web links

• Literature by and about Gisbert Keseling in the catalog of the German National Library