The Impact of Different Information Sources on Idea Generation: Writing Off the Top of Our Heads

College students wrote compositions that elicited their technical knowledge of economics, cancer, or growing flowers. They later completed a questionnaire that assessed which information sources had contributed to their knowledge about these topics. We analyzed the extent to which the number and the quality of the ideas generated could be predicted by four major information sources: formal education, mass media, social interaction, and direct experience. Most of the ideas generated were true, culturally familiar, and unsophisticated. The implications of the results are discussed in the context of some cognitive theories of the writing process.