In this first academic keynote address, Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen explores the relation between creativity and fluency in writing. He discusses how the psycholinguistics of text production can contribute to an understanding of how creativity in writing can positively be influenced.

As a cognitive complex process, writing involves not only high-level processing such as decision-making, selecting the appropriate rhetorical strategies and being creative, it also consists of low-level processing tasks such as vocabulary retrieval, syntax and planning. In competent writers this low-level processing is well automatized, so most of the attention resources are available for high-level writing processes. However, if low-level processing is disfluent and, as a result, requires more working memory, high-level processing and the potential for creativity is diminished. One way of promoting creativity is thus to automate low-level processing.

Current writing instruction is not well designed to achieve this automating goal. The feedback students receive on their writing is very product-oriented and hardly takes the writing process into consideration. With this in mind, Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen and his research team developed computer-assisted learning tools, combining keystroke-logging and eye-tracking, to provide feedback on the finished text as well as on the writing process. The data obtained from these tools can then be used to provide more actionable writing tutorials, modify the actual writing process and give insight into how students learn to write.

One can conclude that to foster creativity in writing, it is crucial to reduce the cognitive load of low-level processing tasks, avoid interruptions and increase the fluency of writing.
—Caroline Dothee