In order to examine the differential availability of attention between the self-written text and standard text conditions, changes in error detection performance of unskilled hearing writers were compared with those of profoundly deaf writers. Subjects, 10 profoundly, pre-lingually deaf college freshmen with no additional handicaps and a comparison group of 5 hearing freshmen, produced separate written accounts of two short stories that they viewed on videotape. Subjects then reviewed and revised their original drafts and later reviewed and revised a passage with standard content after representative errors had been embedded in the passage. Generally, the deaf writers were less successful than the hearing subjects at correcting errors in their own compositions, and both groups of subjects were more successful correcting the errors in the standard passage than in those that they had written themselves. Results indicated that even during a dedicated error search, the language constraint faces considerable competition for the writer's attention--the working memory always encounters potential invasion by the meaning of the text. Findings also (1) showed that the process of writing about a certain topic promotes the retrievability of that information--its ease of returning to working memory with a minimum of prompting; and (2) suggest that explicit knowledge of grammar conventions is not completely at a writer's disposal during composing and editing. (One table of data is included, and 17 references and one appendix showing an application of the Crandall scoring system are attached.) (MS)