Before good writers write, they have a plan. They are, however, willing to change their plan as they write and come up with new ideas.

Good writers are willing to revise. They consider their early drafts to be tentative, and understand that as they move from draft to draft they come up with new ideas.

Good writers delay editing. They concern themselves with formal correctness only after they are satisfied with the ideas they put on the page.

Good writers stop frequently and reread what they have written.

The above are the "classical" components of the composing process. There is good reason to add two more components:

Productive writers engage in "regular daily writing" rather than "binge writing"; instead of waiting until they have large blocks of free time, they write a modest amount each day, a strategy demonstrated to produce more writing as well as more new ideas (Boice, 1994). Also, good writers understand the importance of short breaks that encourage "incubation," new ideas and solutions to problems that emerge when writers leave their writing and give their minds a rest (Krashen, 2001).

It has been proposed (Krashen, in press) that the strategies that make up the composing process perform two valuable functions: In addition to encouraging the emergence of new ideas, they keep writers from losing their place. Losing one's place is very easy to do when problems are complex. A plan obviously helps writers know where they are, rereading reminds writers where they are, delaying editing prevents loosing the train of thought, and failure to write regularly is a guarantee of losing one's place.

The strategies that make up the composing process are most valuable when writing involves complex issues and difficult problems. There is less need for planning, rereading, and revision when writing simple descriptions and summaries, and more need for these strategies when writing requires the integration of a great deal of diverse information, when a complex analysis is called for, or when data can be interpreted in different ways.

Writer's block

Failure to use these strategies when writing on complex topics is one cause of writer's block, defined as "an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of basic skill or commitment" (Rose, 1984, p. 3).

Rose (1984) has presented a number of cases of writer's block that are clearly due to lack of mastery of the composing process. Rose inspected the composing behavior of college students who scored high on the blocking subscale and noted that they tended to engage in premature editing more than subjects classified as low blockers, and had inappropriate strategies for dealing with complexity. One high blocker, Liz, for example, was so preoccupied with editing and correctness that she would often forget the thought she was trying to express (Rose, 1984, p. 46). Liz also failed to engage in sufficient planning before writing, "but planned in increments as she wrote" (p. 48), which prevented her from getting a sense of the whole essay.

Rose also operationalized writer's block in the form of a questionnaire. The questionnaire has items dealing with the existence of writer's block (eg "There are times when I sit at my desk for hours, unable to write a thing."), referred to as the "writer's block subscale" as well as subscales that cover hypothesized causes of writer's block:

1. Premature editing, an excessive concern with form while writing, was covered in several questions, such as: "Each sentence I write has to be just right before I'll go on to the next sentence." Premature editing is, of course, a failure to apply a crucial composing process strategy, delaying editing.

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