As a by-product of a study concerning how university level writers develop new genres of discourse, a study was undertaken to examine what factors or dimensions affect the composing process of university writers. Six undergraduate students at Carleton University in Ottawa participated, making available to researchers information about how they organized information in general, how they organized information from their classes, and how they went about writing papers for law classes as opposed to other classes. Data were gathered from papers the students had written, notes they had taken, and one to two hour personal interviews each week. Results suggested that students varied widely in their approach to digesting information and producing written work, from holding long open ended conversations with one another, to "brooding" about the material alone before writing about it. Students ranged from those who were largely structure oriented but tended to produce simplistic, inadequate papers, and those who were less structured, more "texture" oriented, and who tended to use writing conversation heuristically, but had difficulty producing written work and became frequently blocked in their writing. (JC)