this book is a developmental crosslinguistic and cross-orthographic perspective on learning to write from preschool up to university level, from childrens earliest conceptions of the meaning of writing up to university students struggling with the meaning of computer writing. it includes original research in three different writing systems (roman, hebrew, and chinese) and six languages (chinese, german, english, french, hebrew, and spanish) in different knowledge dimensions of writing: general meaning and function of writing, graphic conventions, punctuation, morphology, and discursive organization. the authors demonstrate that writing is a source of knowledge that triggers cognitive and linguistic development. they also show that the study of writing development is of crucial importance for developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, curriculum planners, and teachers at every educational level.