ABSTRACT
Recently there has been a surge of interest in studying the basic psychological processes involved in composing written discourse. In part, this new interest is motivated by a "writing crisis" that the news media declared after a National Assessment of Educational Progress (1975) study reported a decline in the writing performance of 13- and 17-year-old students. There was research on written composition prior to this time, but its emphasis was different from current writing research. Specifically, the earlier research focused on how best to teach writing (Steinberg, 1963, is typical), whereas the new research investigates the nature of the writing process itself. Three recent collections of papers personify this new orientation: the papers in Cooper and Odell (1978) pose a large number of important research questions, and the papers in Gregg and Steinberg (1980) and Frederiksen, Whiteman, and Dominic (in press) report initial studies that use new research methods to investigate writing. Much of what I describe in the following is drawn from the last two collections.
