When responding to a writing task, writers spend a significant amount of their time not writing. These periods of physical inactivity, or pauses, during writing provide observable and measurable cues as to when, where, and how long writers halt to plan and/or revise their texts. Consequently, examining writers' pausing patterns can provide…

Verbal protocols are usually used to study cognitive processes involved in various activities, as it is argued that they could make implicit processes of thinking visible and thus reportable. Here, it is proposed that verbalisations can also be approached from another angle, namely as a discourse that contains linguistic markers of writers'…

This article reports on a study in which stimulated recall data and quantitative measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) were used to address three interconnected questions in different planning conditions: (1) how learners share their limited attentional capacity with different cognitive processes of 'planner/proposer', 'translator'…

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer's mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating--that is, the "monitor." The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two…

Within the current test-centered educational reform movement, considerable emphasis is placed on using assessment results to make instructional decisions for individual students. Test scores are used to estimate a student's current level of skill, monitor his or her progress during instruction, and identify whether the student has gained the…

Little is known about the effects of various planning and revising conditions on composition quality in experimental or TESOL education research. This study examined the effects of planning conditions (planning, prolonged planning, free writing, and control), subplanning conditions (task-given, task-content-given, and…

Studies on second language (L2) learners writing in English have found that composing is a recursive process requiring planning, formulating and revising. Of particular note among the many studies that have explored the composing processes of L2 writers are two characteristics: 1) They examine the composing processes of writers in real-time while…

Describes a case study of the composing strategies used by a professional writer, Donald Murray, concentrating on his planning and revision processes. (FL)

Argues that in teaching students to write as critics, educators need to ask them to change not how they think but how they work--to take on a new sort of intellectual practice. Shows how helping students become more aware of choices they make in revising their texts can help them gain control of using the work of others and gain a reflectiveness…

Describes an informal classroom research project that explored how children perceive the changes they make in their writing and what they think about when they write. (HTH)

Analyzes the steps in the writing of an established poet and an 11-year-old boy. An appendix provides suggestions about how to encourage meaningful revision. (FL)

Describes classroom experiments, using invisible writing which produces a carbon copy while preventing scanning during the composing process, to examine how different writing tasks differ in their cognitive demands and how the need for scanning may indicate the cognitive difficulty of the task. (HTH)

Describes some of the key intellectual actions that underlie the process of revision in writing and that most affect its practice. Provides a working model of revision and discusses diagnosing problems and devising solutions. (HTH)

Both first-order creative, intuitive thinking and second-order critical thinking can and should be encouraged in writing instruction. The first helps generate ideas, and the second is useful in refining expression. The two kinds of thinking enhance different writing skills and can be mutually reinforcing. (MSE)

This study looks at a specific application of Ainsworth's conceptual framework for learning with multiple representations in the context of using multiple sequential graphic organizers that are student-generated for a process-writing task. Process writing refers to writing that consists of multiple drafts. It may be a process of re-writing without…