How do students effectively handle reading to write: the process of creating a text of their own, integrating their own ideas with those of their sources, driven by their own purpose? This revolutionary study takes a comprehensive look at this critical point in every students academic performance. Flower examines a group of freshman working on thier first reading-to-write college assignments. To clearly show the cognitive process at work in a realistic academic context, she records the students' think-aloud processes as they work in their dorms, interviews them, and takes into account their self-analysis, analysis of the text, and preconceived social, cultural, and contextual notions of writing at the college level. Flower's study reveals both the legacy of schooling and some radical differences in the goals and strageties students give themselves studies the freshman r college trying to negotiate the task of reading-to-write. academic performance,