ABSTRACT

In the preceding chapter the point was made that listing the many demands on a writer’s attention (spelling, punctuation, word choice, purpose, organization, reader characteristics, and so on) misrepresents the difficulty of the task. What count are the demands that compete for attention simultaneously. A process may consist of many parts and yet be simple to carry out, provided those parts can be dealt with one by one. What makes a process complex is the inter-dependency of components, which requires that a number of elements be coordinated or taken into account jointly. The question raised in the present chapter is, How complex is composition really? We do not presume to give a decisive answer to the question, but we do try to show that more can be said on the matter than might at first seem likely.