One model of discourse production attempts to explicate deeper-level decisions that writers make, to explain why some writing activities may be more successful than others, and to indicate likely profitable modes of instruction. The model views discourse production as a series of three interactive decision levels in which (1) predicting/perceiving, (2) ideating/confirming; and (3) presenting/confirming strategies reduce the semantic knowledge to be presented and encode it into a surface-level linguistic representation. Each decision level produces a pretext structure (message base, text base) that is successively more textually and semantically organized than the previous one, and on which the next decision can operate. While all strategies are used and judged in terms of previously made decisions on other levels, implying a sequence of production, the process is interactive in nature and it is possible that all or various levels might be active simultaneously. (DF)