Methods for studying the writing time-course

The understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie written composition requires analysis of moment-by-moment fluctuation in the rate of output that go beyond traditional approaches to writing time-course analysis based on, for example, counting pauses. This special issue includes 10 papers that provide important new tools and methods for extracting and analyzing writing timecourse data that go beyond traditional approaches. The papers in this special issue divide into three groups: papers that describe methods for capturing and coding writing timecourse data from writers producing text either by hand or by keyboard, papers that describe new statistical approaches to describing and drawing inferences from these data, and papers that focus on analysis of how a text develops over time as the writer makes changes to what they have already written.