ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to identify some of the hurdles that must be passed on the way to competence in written composition. The starting point of the present inquiry is to ask what anyone would have to learn in order to become a competent writer, given that the person already has normal conversational abilities and ability to read and produce written language. It might seem that in taking these abilities as given, we have chosen to ignore the most important bases of writing competence—the early acquisition of communication abilities (Bruner, 1983; Dickson, 1981) and early stages in the acquisition of literacy (Clay, 1975; Harste & Burke, 1980).
