Since the 1980s, especially in the American scientific community, cognitive models have been developed to illustrate how writing processes are organized. A very popular model of the writing process was presented by John R. Hayes and Linda S. Flower in 1980, who understand writing as a complex, individual and recursive problem solving process. Through analyzing writing processes it is expected to get information about how to facilitate this extremely challenging cognitive process for the writer and about how to optimize the writing process in order to improve the writing product.

Didactics of writing, which focus on the writing process, acquired some fame with the successful introduction of the personal computer as a comfortable tool for word processing. Digital texts have the advantage of being ”fluid“, which means that they can be revised easily, repeatedly and without leaving any trace of the revision process. Computer technology also makes it possible to analyse the writing process in more detail and with less effort, new methods being i.e. screen capturing and eye tracking.

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