The Style-Checker as Tonic, Not Tranquilizer

Finally, a cognitive process model of the sort presented here is both a theory and a distillation of data. It represents in our case the range of processes observed in detailed data on fourteen writers, whose behavior, we should add, invalidated a number of other reasonable models we constructed along the way. Because such a model is data-based rather than speculative, it reflects behavior of indi vidual writers rather than of the world as a whole. However, this means that it can offer us a concrete working hypothesis which can be tested against new evidence.