ABSTRACT
The process of creating well-crafted written text is rarely achieved without pain. The act of writing is variously described from cognitive perspectives as complex, effortful, and cognitively costly: Hayes and Flower (1980) remind us that “turning verbal thought into text is a demanding task” (Hayes & Flower, 1980, p. 39) and more recently, Kellogg (2008, p. 2) has argued that writing is as cognitively challenging as playing chess. In principle, this level of demand is conceptualized as the cost of managing competing and complementary constraints on the writer’s mental resources, “the act of juggling a number of simultaneous constraints” (Hayes & Flower, 1980, p. 31). Depending on the writer’s proficiency, this juggling might include, among other things, attention to transcription and the orthographic aspects of texts, the selection of appropriate words and syntactical structures, the holding of local and global ideas in harmony, and the shaping of the communicative message for the intended audience. It is a process, as Coleridge (1817/1985) lyrically depicts, “in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice” (p. 485).
