Linguistic abilities and challenging assignments

students have been shown to regress in writing performance at the level of sentence grammar when first attempting more complex cognitive and rhetorical tasks (Has well, 1991; Kitzhaber, 1963), making a neat, linear progression of linguis tic skills unlikely. Rather, writers' growth in linguistic abilities is likely to resemble a spiraling process that allows for regression and plateaus in learning as well^as forward progress (Haswell, 1991). (Beaufort, WRW, p. 139)