The notion of content clusters was developed in the course of the student writing research at UWA and was found to be a simple way to describe the difficulty students had in organising information in the course of writing. The term cluster refers to:

"...component categories that are topics abstracted from their lexical semantic elements. We maintain that for better readability, content should occur in clusters which can be linked with the usual cohesive devices that operate at the global level in a piece of writing". (Kaldor, Herriman & Rochecouste 1998:26)