What is known empirically is that writers operating at the initial knowledge-telling stage of development clearly struggle with understanding what the text actually says. As Beal (1996) observed, young writers who compose by telling their knowledge have trouble seeing the literal meaning of their texts, as those texts would appear to prospective readers. The young author focuses on his or her thoughts not on how the text itself reads. The verbal protocols collected by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) of children clearly document the essential focus on the author’s representation rather than the text and reader representations. The text produced.
