The process of writing is explored from three perspectives in this paper. In the first part of the paper writing is viewed as a communicative act with four principles that form tacit objectives in any communicative act: comprehensibility, enticingness, persuasiveness, and memorability. The second part of the paper, which examines writing in the context of a taxonomy of communicative acts, explores the differences between oral and written language along the following dimensions: interaction, involvement, modality, spatial commonality, temporal commonality, concreteness of referents, and separability of characters. The third part of the paper examines these differences in a process model of writing with discussion given to the subskills of idea production, discovering ideas, and manipulating ideas. Strategies suggested for systematically grouping ideas include compare and contrast, taxonomize, dimensionalize, and componentialize. Text production is then analyzed through three kinds of devices: structural devices, stylistic devices, and content devices. Editing is next discussed in terms of text level operators, especially those that beginning writers should learn to apply. The last part of the paper explores some of the problems beginning writers might experience and suggests some intermediate writing tasks that exercise different subskills. (HOD)