ABSTRACT
One of the best critical appraisals of the cognitive approach to writing is reported in a paper by Pietro Boscolo (1995), who recommended it as an approach that “so convincingly described the complexity of writing” (p. 344). However, as Boscolo stressed, the complexity of writing, as documented in empirical research, does not easily transfer to models of writing and writing development. Nowadays a hierarchical model of writing processes still dominates. This model considers the linguistic process of writing as split in two: a high-level process, related to the linguistic generation of words, sentences, and paragraphs in texts (text generation), and a low-level process, related to the transcription of the text generated. This picture echoes past linguistic theories of writing, according to which the act of writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language through transcription (Bloomfield, 1970). Two characteristics of the transcription process contributed to this view: (1) transcription can be automated, and (2) transcription pertains to the processing and representation of minimal linguistic units: graphemes, words, and word parts (word bases, suffixes, and prefixes). As a result, many educators and clinicians neglect the complex linguistic nature of the transcription process related to spelling, especially in orthographies where sounds-to-letters correspondences are very predictable and regular.
