A group of graduate students in English and language education were given a series of instructor-designed and self-designed reading and writing tasks. They wrote formal papers in response to these tasks and kept retrospective journals describing their reading and writing strategies. The study looks at the nature of introspective accounts and the usefulness of such accounts in studies of the composing process. Several writing tasks are described and analyzed, and three brief case studies are presented. The study concludes that retrospective journal accounts are a rich source of information because they permit consideration of the complex context within which composing occurs.