Biography

John Hayes is an emeritus professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research has focused on the nature and interrelationships of the cognitive and motivational processes involved in writing. To carry out this research, he has made use of rigorous research methods and tools borrowed from cognitive psychology. For example, throughout his career, he has used computer modeling to provide explicit and testable models of writing processes. He has also used protocol analysis in addition to standard research methods to understand relations among writing processes and to provide empirical input to his models. His research and models have explored editing, revision, sentence construction, writer’s knowledge, spatial factors, working memory, and emotion in writing. He has applied his results to improve the processes of editing, revision, and audience perception through the development of tutors and instructional procedures.
Researchers in Europe and around the world have made considerable progress in advancing this new scientific field of writing research. However, much remains to be discovered. Writing research is an exciting field for young researchers who can bring new perspectives and new methods to increase understanding of writing processes and improve methods of writing instruction.

Representative Research Publications

   Hayes, J. R., & Clark, H. H.  (1970).  Experiments on the segmentation of an artificial speech analogue. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.
   Wallace, D., & Hayes, J. R. (1989). Redefining revision for freshmen. Research in the Teaching of English, 25 (1), 54-66.
   Hatch, J. A., Hill, C. A., &Hayes, J. R. (1993). When the messenger is the message. Written Communication, 10(4), 569-598.
   Chenoweth, N. A. & Hayes, J. R. (2003) The inner voice in writing. Written communication, 20, 99-118.
   Hayes, J. R.  (2009) From idea to text. Chapter 4 in D. Myhill (ed.) The Sage Handbook of Writing Development. London: SAGE Publications 
   Hayes, J. R. (2012) Modeling and remodeling writing. Written Communication, 29, 3, 369-388.
   Hayes, J. R. (2023). Modeling the impact of emotions on descriptive writing. In X. Liu, M. Hebert, & R. A. Alves (Eds.), The hitchhiker’s guide to writing research: A festschrift for Steve Graham (pp. 13-28). Springer.