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Note taking is a complex activity that requires comprehension and selection of information and written production processes. Here we review the functions, abbreviation procedures, strategies, and working memory constraints of note taking with the aim of improving theoretical and practical understanding of the activity. The time urgency of selecting key points and recording them while comprehending new information at the same time places significant demands on the central executive and other components of working memory. Dual-and triple-task procedures allow the measurement of the momentary cognitive effort or executive attention allocated to note taking. Comparative data show that note taking demands more effort than reading or learning. However, it requires less effort than the creative written composition of an original text.

Preparing a written outline during preventing and composing a rough first draft are strategies that may ease attentional overload and consequently enhance writing performance. The present research examined how these strategies affect the efficiency of the writing process and the quality of the written product. The processing time and cognitive effort given to planning ideas, translating ideas into text, and reviewing ideas and text were monitored by using directed retrospection and comparing secondary-task reaction times. These measures indicated whether strategies controlled attention allocation in a way that alleviated attentional overload. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that preparing a written outline, compared with not doing so, led to higher quality documents as indexed by ratings of judges. Composing a rough draft, as opposed to a polished draft, had no beneficial effect on writing quality. The findings of Experiment 2 showed that a mental outline improved the quality of the documents as much as a written outline, indicating that the written outline was not serving as an external memory aid. Also, both mental and written outlines eased attentional overload by allowing the writer to focus processing time, though not cognitive effort, on the single process of translating ideas into text.

Conditions of low and high knowledge about the topic of a writing task were compared in terms of the time and cognitive effort allocated to writing processes. These processes were planning ideas, translating ideas into text, and reviewing ideas and text during document composition. Directed retrospection provided estimates of the time devoted to each process, and secondary task reaction times indexed the cognitive effort expended. Topic knowledge was manipulated by selecting subjects in Experiment 1 and by selecting topics in Experiment 2. The retrospection results indicated that both low-and high-knowledge writers intermixed planning, translating, and reviewing during all phases of composing. There was no evidence that low-and high-knowledge writers adopt different strategies for allocating processing time. About 50 % of writing time was devoted to translating throughout composition. From early to later phases of composing, the percentage of time devoted to planning decreased and that devoted to reviewing increased. The secondary task results showed that the degree of cognitive effort devoted to planning, translating, and reviewing depended on the task. Also, the high-knowledge writers expended less effort overall than did the low-knowledge writers; there was no difference in allocation strategy across planning, translating, and reviewing.Research on the writing process has increased markedly in recent years (Beach & Bridwell, 1984;de Beaugrande, 1980; Frederiksen & Dominic, 1981; Gregg & Steinberg, 1980;Nystrand, 1982). This interest is warranted given the importance of writing in work settings (Faigley & Miller, 1982;Odell & Goswami, 1984) and the concern raised by the ongoing National Assessment of Educational Progress that schools are not adequately preparing students in writing. Although research advances are being made, numerous basic questions remain, at best, only partially answered. One such question is how the knowledge of the writer affects the writing process. The importance of knowledge differences in other tasks, such as reading comprehension (Voss, Vesonder, & Spilich, 1980) and problem solving (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), suggests that this should be a key factor in writing.Writers differ in what they know about their language, audience, and topic (Applebee, 1982). The present studies examined how knowledge of the topic being written about affects the amount of processing time and cognitive effort allocated to various writing processes. Although linguistic and audience knowledge also deserve exploration, they fall beyond the scope of this initial investigation. Processing time and cognitive effort were selected because, as will be discussed below, they concern two prominent features of writing based on current theory and empirical findings.The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for the useful suggestions they provided on an earlier version of this manuscript. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Ronald T. Kellogg, Department of Psychology, University of Missouri-Rolla, Rolla, M...

Writing a text requires the coordination of multiple high-level composition processes in working memory, including planning, language generation, and reviewing, in addition to low-level motor transcription. Here, interference in reaction time (RT) for detecting auditory probes was used to measure the attentional demands of (1) copying in longhand a prepared text (transcription), (2) composing a text and pausing handwriting for longer than 250 msec (composition), and (3) composing and currently handwriting (transcription + composition). Greater interference in the transcription + composition condition than in the transcription condition implies that high-level processes are activated concurrently with motor execution, resulting in higher attentional demands. This difference was observed for adults who wrote in standard cursive, but not for children and not for adults who used an unpracticed uppercase script. Greater interference in the composition condition than in the transcription condition implies that high-level processes demand more attention than do motor processes. This difference was observed only when adults wrote with a practiced script. With motor execution being relatively automatic, adults were able to attend fully to the high-level processes required in mature, effective composition. One reason that children fail to engage in such high-level processes is that motor processes deplete available attention.