An argument is presented for distinguishing between fluency and automaticity of procedures in writing. Writers must develop a certain level of fluency in some of their writing subskills, but skilled writing necessitates that automaticity not be absolute, not be “modular” to use Fodor's (1983) terminology. Various empirical results are presented suggesting that a prominent difference between skilled and less skilled writing is the extent of metacognitive control over writing subprocesses. It is this metacognitive control, not increasing encapsulated automaticity, that enables the processes that characterize skilled writing, such as directed search, critical examination, and revision. Educational implications of this premise are explored.

Two studies investigated the editing strategies used by college basic writing (BW) students as they went about correcting sentence-level errors in controlled editing tasks. One study involved simple word processing, and a second involved an interactive editor that supplemented the word-processing program, giving students feedback on their correction attempts and helping them focus on the errors. In both studies BW students showed two clearly different editing strategies, a consulting strategy in which grammatical rules were consulted and an intuiting strategy in which the sound of the text was assessed for “goodness” in a rather naturalistic way. Students consistently used their intuiting strategies more effectively; however, errors requiring consulting strategies showed a larger improvement after intervention by the interactive editor. Cognitive implications of the editing strategies are discussed in terms of the requisite knowledge involved in successful application of each strategy.