ABSTRACT
The cognitive approach to text composition, which began in the early 1980s following two chapters from Hayes and Flower (1980) and Flower and Hayes (1980), first investigated the cognitive processes necessary to compose a text. In the decade that followed Hayes and Flower’s publications, a few studies attempted to understand how limits of the human cognitive system impose constraints on writing operations. At that time, working memory was already considered as a major limitation on human information processing (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). Working memory indeed entails the ability to manipulate and to temporary store information, and is assumed to be of limited capacity. Thus, echoing Flower and Hayes (1980) who had underlined that writers are “full-time overloaded” (p. 33), a few studies examined writers’ cognitive effort (e.g., Kellogg, 1987, 1988), which was considered as an index of the global engagement of working memory by writers. Research on working memory in writing fully developed in the 1990s, as a result of more elaborated theories on working memory (Baddeley 1986; Just & Carpenter, 1992), but also because models of writing that integrated working memory were proposed (McCutchen, 1994, 1996; Kellogg, 1996). Since, both writing acquisition and skilled writing have been shown to be strongly related to working memory.
