ABSTRACT
The term “writing” in the English language often signifies a globally understood definition, at least in the eyes of the speaker. Yet the word itself has multiple meanings, each of which denotes something different. Writing can refer to the systems we use to transcribe letters and words, but it can also refer to the language used to convey meaning (Tolchinsky, 2006). Writing has been described as a process of production of texts as well. Since the 1980s writing has been conceptualized as a problem-solving process, but this conceptualization was not new to the work of the 1980s. As early as 1965, articles about writing as a process were published, and this was a primary area of discussion for the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966—a group devoted to the examination of written expression (see Nystrand, 2006). Emig, in the early 1970s, and later Flower and Hayes, developed models of writing that described writing as a cognitive process (Nystrand, 2006), and it is from that perspective that we will address written language in this chapter. In that regard, we view written language as a problem-solving process wherein writers attempt to produce a visible, legible, and understandable product that emphasizes their declarative knowledge (Hooper, 2002).
