People often refer to writing as thinking without necessarily knowing where and how this idea developed. It is in part from Linda Flower and John Hayes who published a paper in 1981 offering a cognitive process theory of writing. And reading their paper again, now, shows that their observations are still pretty apt descriptions of the work that goes into writing. 

The paper’s central argument is that writing is not a linear sequence of stages. Flower and Hayes propose three basic writing processes – planning, translating, and reviewing – and any of them can be embedded inside any other at any moment You don’t plan, then draft, then revise. You do all of these things simultaneously, recursively, in no fixed order. Planning happens mid-sentence. Revision happens before a word is written. A writer composing a sentence might suddenly need to generate new ideas, organise them, evaluate them, and try again, all in the service of finishing that one sentence.

This process will be recognisable to any academic writer. You sit down to draft a section you thought you had planned, and the act of writing reveals that you don’t actually know what you think yet. The draft becomes a thinking tool, not just a transcription of pre-formed ideas.

Flower and Hayes also talked about what they called process goals and content goals. Process goals are the instructions you give yourself about how to write: “I’ll just get something down,” “I’ll come back to this bit,” “let me free-write for a while.” Content goals are different, they are about what you want to say to your reader.

Good writers, Flower and Hayes observed, tend to have more explicit process goals and more conscious control over when they shift between process and content modes of working. Weaker writers often lack this self-monitoring capacity, which they call the “monitor.” They get stuck because they don’t have a way of telling themselves to stop generating and start organising, or to stop editing a sentence and get back to the bigger picture.

The notion of goals and the monitor is helpful for doctoral writers. Many of the difficulties people experience around academic writing are not about knowledge, or even about language. They are about process management. The person who cannot move forward because every sentence has to be perfect before the next one can be written is, in Flower and Hayes’ terms, allowing low-level goals (correct spelling, neat syntax) to crowd out higher-level goals (what am I actually trying to argue here?). The writing freezes. The monitor is not working.

Flower and Hayes also discuss  “writer-based prose” – writing organised around the writer’s own discovery process and memory structure rather than around what the reader needs. The text faithfully shows how the writer came to know something, but it doesn’t reorganise that knowledge for someone coming to it fresh. 

Much early doctoral writing has this quality. The writer knows the material and has thought hard about it, and the prose shows the journey. The reader, though, needs the destination, with a clear path to it. Revising writer-based prose into reader-based prose is a necessary, specific and learnable skill, and naming it helps.

Another Flower and Hayes contribution is their account of goal-setting as a creative act. Writers don’t just execute pre-existing plans; they generate their goals as they write, refine them, sometimes abandon them and set new ones in response to what the writing itself reveals.

This is what Flower and Hayes mean when they say that writing is a way of learning. The act of trying to put something into words changes what you know about it. You don’t just record a thought; you discover it more precisely. Or you discover that you hadn’t actually thought it through yet. Flower and Hayes say that goal-setting and prose-making are reciprocal. They call this “write and regenerate” – you write something, see that it’s not quite right or not quite enough, and that failure generates a better goal for what the writing needs to do next.

The methodology used for the research reported in the paper is also noteworthy. Flower and Hayes used think-aloud protocols: writers composing out loud near a tape recorder, verbalising everything, including false starts, stray thoughts, abandoned sentences. These recordings were a record of actual composing processes in the moment rather than writers’ retrospective accounts of what they did, which tend to be tidied up and shaped by what the writer thinks they should have done. The messiness in the think-aloud transcripts is the point. Real writing is disorganised at the local level even when it is purposeful at the larger level.

The think-aloud strategy is something academic writers might try if they want to learn more about their writing process, if they want to diagnose what they are doing and what they might do differently.

So, is the Flower and Hayes paper dated? In some ways, yes. It says nothing about writing collaboratively, about writing across languages, about the social dimensions of academic genres and what gets rewarded or penalised within disciplinary communities. Later work on writing moved the conversation outward from the individual writer’s cognitive processes to the institutional and social contexts that shape what writing means and what counts as competent. That later work matters; Flower and Hayes aren’t all there is to know about academic writing research by a long stretch.

But for an academic writer sitting alone with a draft at ten in the evening, wondering why it isn’t working, the Flower and Hayes cognitive process framework still offers something. The writing may not be working because planning, translating, and reviewing are all happening at once without much coordination. The monitor is overwhelmed or absent. The goals are too vague or too local. The prose is still writer-based.

Knowing the names for these writing issues doesn’t automatically fix them, but it can take some of the panic out. The difficulty is not a sign that you can’t write, or that you don’t know enough, or that you aren’t a real academic. It’s a sign that you are doing something genuinely hard, and that it requires process management as well as knowledge. Those are learnable things – and Flower and Hayes terms and think aloud strategy might help.