ABSTRACT
Writing often seems a very mysterious process. When we write, somehow or other, ideas which are in our heads, perhaps only in the very vaguest of forms, have to be shaped into coherent representations in language and transferred onto paper, screen or other media so they can be inspected by some other person. Although we vary greatly in the amount of writing that we do, we all have a tendency to take the process for granted. Even those who write a great deal will, when asked to describe the difficulties of writing, tend to focus upon the original development of ideas rather than on the process of shaping these into language. The term we use to describe having difficulties in writing, ‘writer’s block’, is understood by most people to mean having difficulty in getting ideas for writing rather than difficulty in transferring these to the page.
