What’s happening in your mind when you write an essay? A look inside the writer’s thought processes

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From blank page to finished paper

Staring at a blank page can be one of the most intimidating parts of academic life. It’s not uncommon to feel that writing an essay is a single, mysterious talent that you either have or you don’t. The good news is that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Writing isn’t a magical act but a series of distinct mental processes that everyone goes through. To understand these “hidden” processes, researchers conducted a study (Reid, 2025) where they asked sixteen L2 international students at UK universities to “think aloud” while they worked on a writing task, giving us a unique window into the writer’s mind. The study also revealed a common discrepancy: while students often feel reasonably confident, their instructors report that mastering these writing skills is a steep learning curve for most.

This guide will walk you through the four key phases that writers move through: Conceptualisation, Discourse construction, Organisation, & Monitoring & revising. Understanding these phases can demystify the writing process, making it clearer, more manageable, & much less stressful.

The four phases of academic writing

Let’s break down the four distinct phases of mental effort your brain engages in when you write an academic, source-based essay.

Phase

Processes

Conceptualising

Planning & constructing task representation

Reconstructing writing plans (revising & adapting)

Discourse constructing

Connecting & generating ideas

Search reading (finding information)

Careful reading (processing & understanding)

Organising

Connecting intertextual relationships between ideas

Organising ideas into a textual structure

Monitoring & revising

Low-level (language features)

High-level (coherence, cohesion)

Table 1: Adapted from Chan’s model of writing from sources (Chan, 2018)

Interestingly, these processes also reflect a fundamental principle from the science of learning, the Selecting, organising, & integrating principle (Fiorella & Mayer, 2020), by which learners respond to a prompt or task by:

  • Selecting the relevant/salient items of information

  • Organising them to explore & define their relationships to each other

  • Integrating these new ideas into prior knowledge, e.g. thinking of concrete examples where the principles/ideas might apply & combining items to generate new ideas

Thereby generating (or ‘constructing’ if you prefer) new knowledge in the mind of the learner.

Phase 1: Conceptualisation – Creating the blueprint (9.1% of effort*)

*Effort means time spent on these processes.

Conceptualisation is the initial planning stage where you work out exactly what the assignment is asking for & how you will approach it. It’s about establishing an initial, flexible direction for your work. The two most important activities in this phase are:

  • Understanding the task: This involves more than a quick read through the prompt. It means carefully reading the instructions, thinking about the purpose of your writing (e.g. is it an argument or a report?), & considering what your reader, your professor or instructor, expects to see.

  • Making a plan: This is where you form an initial idea of what you need to write. Most writers don’t create a detailed outline before reading, but instead use this phase to map out a general direction.

Thoughts from writers

Notice how these writers aren’t just reading the prompt, but actively defining its boundaries to guide their work:

“it’s just a report so I don’t give disadvantages”

“so, this means create an argument”

“instead of putting my recommendations towards the end, I can recommend within the text”

This brief planning phase is an investment; a clear understanding of the task here prevents wasted time & effort later.

Phase 2: Discourse construction – Gathering & connecting ideas (26.4% of effort)

Discourse construction is the active process of gathering your raw materials. This is where you engage with the source texts, pull out important information &, most importantly, connect that information to what you already know to form new ideas. The three most critical activities here are:

  • Careful reading: This activity takes up the most time in this phase. It involves pausing to put things in your own words (paraphrasing), identifying the main point (extracting the gist), & reading between the lines to draw conclusions (making inferences).

  • Connecting to your knowledge: This is where true learning, or “knowledge transformation,” happens. You link what you’re reading to your own experiences or previous studies, which helps you form a much deeper & more personal understanding of the topic.

  • Developing new ideas: Academic writing isn’t about simply reporting what your sources say. It’s about using those sources as a springboard to generate your own unique insights, arguments, & conclusions.

Thoughts from writers

Here, writers connect ideas from a text to their broader life experience, showing how ‘knowledge transformation’ happens in real time:

[reads source text] “like everything in life, if you start at a young age, for example, learning new language, there’s a higher possibility that you can learn it very quick”

“oh yeah, I want to write about how like different skills acquired beforehand can also come in handy in future”

[before reading] “I know there are some restrictions to only allow some kinds of car to pass through the streets in a period of time”

Ultimately, this phase is about being an active builder of knowledge. You are not just a passive reporter of facts, you are constructing a new understanding based on the evidence you find.

Phase 3: Organisation – Structuring your argument (8.7% of effort)

The Organisation phase is where you take all the ideas you’ve gathered & begin arranging them into a logical & persuasive structure. It’s about creating a clear & coherent path for your reader to follow. The two main activities are:

  • Grouping source ideas: This involves looking at the information you’ve gathered from different texts & finding the relationships between them. For instance, you might group ideas that support each other, identify points that contradict one another, or categorise examples under a common theme (or Selecting, Organising, & Integrating).

  • Structuring your text: This is the practical step of arranging those grouped ideas into an essay structure. The study found that writers often do this on the fly, pausing while writing a paragraph to decide what point should logically come next.

Thoughts from writers

These writers are pausing mid-paragraph to consciously make a structural decision, demonstrating that organisation is an active, ongoing process:

“So, they’re suggesting two tips that contradict each other.”

“Let’s take some point form each text and I will combine everything.”

“Now I want to bring the point of young people changing their mind afterwards as it showed in text B.”

Good organisation is what transforms a collection of interesting but disconnected ideas into a powerful, clear, & convincing argument.

Phase 4: Monitoring & revising – Polishing your work (over 45% of effort)

Monitoring & revising is the continuous process of checking, evaluating, & improving your writing. The study found this was by far the most dominant phase, accounting for over 45% of all mental effort. However, this doesn’t just mean fixing mistakes. A huge part of this phase, over 27% of the total writing time, was spent simply re-reading the text as it was being written or after it was drafted. The active fixing of low-level (grammar, words) & high-level (argument, structure) issues made up the rest. This shows that good writers are in constant dialogue with their own work. Revision happens at two levels:

Level of revision

What it looks like

Thoughts from writers

Low-level

Checking & fixing grammar, spelling, & word choice. The study notes that second-language (L2) writers often focus more here, a well-documented tendency among L2 writers.

“make it separate sentences, I think”

“I used already ‘avoid’. To stop? To change? Or to manage?”

High-level

Checking & fixing bigger picture issues like the clarity of your argument, the organisation of your paragraphs, & whether you’ve fully answered the prompt.

“I don’t think I have explained the pass thing very clearly.” [It might be confusing to some people]

“But I also want to include my perspectives and my knowledge”

“And what else did it say in text B?”

Other high-level

“I’m proud of that idea. That’s such a good idea.” [strength of argumentation]

“again I feel like I’m repeating that counterproductive point” [repetition of content]

The key takeaway here is that revision isn’t a final step you rush through at the end. It’s a constant, vital part of the writing process that happens from the very first sentence to the last. These phases provide a map of the writing process, but the journey itself is rarely a straight line.

It’s a recursive process, not a straight line

While we’ve laid out these four phases in a logical order, it’s important to understand that real-world writing is not a linear process. You don’t complete Phase 1, then move to Phase 2, & so on without looking back.

The research confirms that writers constantly jump between phases. For example, the study found that “revision while writing was far more prevalent” than saving all the editing for a single stage at the end. This means it is perfectly normal to revise a sentence you just wrote (Phase 4), then jump back to re-read a source to confirm a detail (Phase 2), & then briefly rethink the overall structure of your argument (Phase 3). Writing is a recursive, looping process, & this back-and-forth movement is a natural part of creating a coherent, cohesive, polished piece of work.

Three key lessons for your own writing

Based on what the research reveals about the writer’s brain, here are three practical takeaways you can apply to your own academic work:

  1. Embrace constant revision: Remember, the Monitoring & revising phase took up over 45% of the writers’ mental effort in the study. This tells us that good writing is rewriting. Constantly checking & improving your work, from fixing a typo to clarifying an entire argument, is not a sign of weakness, it’s the primary activity of a skilled & thoughtful writer.

  2. Connect, don’t just collect: The Discourse construction phase highlights that strong academic writing is about knowledge transformation. The key skill here is something researchers call conceptual integration. The study found that university tutors see this as the “most challenging” aspect of writing for students. It’s the difference between being a librarian who just collects & lists facts (selecting), & being an architect who uses those facts as building materials to construct a new, unique argument (organising & integrating). Actively look for ways to connect ideas from sources to your own thinking to build a true argument, not just summarise what others have said.

  3. Trust the process: The messy, looping nature of writing is not just normal, it’s how experts work. The study revealed that most writers did not create a detailed macro-plan before reading the sources. Instead, they organised their ideas “on the fly” while writing. Don’t feel discouraged if your plan evolves during the writing process. Understanding that it’s a professional strategy to plan, draft, & organise recursively can make the entire process feel less intimidating & more like a structured (if not always straight) path to a finished product.

Becoming a more confident writer

Academic writing is a complex cognitive skill, but it is not a mystery. By breaking it down into the four interconnected phases of Conceptualisation, Discourse construction, Organisation, & Monitoring & revising, we can see the hidden mental work that goes into crafting a coherent, cohesive essay. By understanding what’s happening in your mind as you move from a blank page to a final draft, you can become a more strategic, effective, & ultimately more confident academic writer.

Please note that the original paper (Reid, 2025) gives more precise & detailed information about the stages, processes, sub-processes, & more quotes of students’ think-aloud processes & is well worth reading.

References