Using a real-time replay of students' word processing to understand and promote better writing

Research on the psychology of writing is difficult because the writing process is not as easy to study as is the written product. The software described in this paper, Real-Time Replay, provides access to the writing process by capturing all writer keystrokes and replaying them in realtime. Point of utterance revisions can be viewed at once by the writer, who can then provide an immediate, retrospective protocol of the process. In this paper, the main features of the replay software are described, along with an accompanying program for collecting descriptive statistics on written documents.