John R. Hayes

John Hayes’s work at Carnegie Mellon turned writing research into an empirical cognitive science. His model treats writing as recursive interaction among task environment, long-term memory, and working processes.

¶Core ideas

• Recursive process model: planning, translating, reviewing as concurrent recursive subprocesses
• Task environment: the writing task and the text-so-far constrain cognitive resources
• Working memory in writing: writing competes for the same limited resource as other complex cognition

¶Key works

• Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes (with Flower, 1980)
• The Complete Problem Solver (1981)