ABSTRACT
It is normal practice for authors writing about the writing process to start with introductory remarks about how difficult it is. This perception is, no doubt, partly a reflection of the author’s own immediate experience. Writing in general, and writing introductory remarks to academic papers in particular, requires high levels of sustained attention. This processing requirement is captured, for example, in Scardamalia and Bereiter’s (1991) argument that, unlike development of expertise in other domains, higher expertise in writing is associated with greater, rather than less, struggle and in the frequent observation that writing makes high demands on cognitive capacity (McCutchen, 1996). Implicit within these “writing-is-difficult” arguments is a contrast with spoken language production, which seems often to proceed automatically and with relatively little need for focused attention.
