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The commonsense notion of expertise treats it as a state—almost a state of grace-in which abundant knowledge and skill make it possible to accomplish with ease things that the nonexpert can do, if at all, only with difficulty. This commonsense notion has been elaborated by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) and supported by a host of expert—novice comparisons in various fields. A notable exception to this" on top of it all" picture of expertise comes from the study of writing. Expert writers generally are found to work harder at the same assigned tasks than nonexperts, engaging in more planning and problem solving, more revision of goals and methods, and in general more agonizing over the task (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987; Flower & Hayes, 1980; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1987). Previous literature has characterized experts by their precise recall of complex, task-specific patterns and by the ease with which they gain acccess to just the right information (Ericsson & Staszewski, 1989; Larkin, McDermott, Simon, &. Simon, 1980; Patel & Groen, 1986). In contrast, expert writers have been found to take more time than novices jnst to start writing the first sentence of a simple narrative (Zbrodoff, 1984), and far longer to complete a one-to two-page essay (Paris, 1986). It is the novice, not the expert, whose rate of text production is fast enough to match handwriting speed. When it comes to memory for text, more advanced writers have been found to have less ready access to the contents of texts they have written. When they produce texts, they bring to mind a great deal of information that they later toss out. Meanwhile, their novice counterparts can recall with …