In the traditional world of SUESL writing research, the term refers to the kind of writing which proceeds from pre-writing activities to the writing itself and on to the post-writing stage. All parts of this adhere to a focus on content (Kroll; Raimes). More recently, FL research has begun to challenge long-held precepts from SUESL studies, especially with a highly inflected language like German and/or learners in the earliest stages (e.g., first year). The strict opposition, for example, between learning and acquisition with its concomitant insistence on teaching versus comprehensible input has been convincingly critiqued by Pienemann, who has formulated a teachability hypothesis and asserts that learners can be taught to move more quickly through predictable stages of grammar concept acquisition if instruction is optimal and learners are developmentally ready. Rott challenges the notion that instruction in a communicative approach must rely exclusively on a focus on content; she outlines a communicative approach to the teaching of German grammar. Our study builds on this growing awareness of the inherent differences between SUESL and FL instruction. To avoid confusion, we will refer to our approach as process editing, but the crux of the matter is that we wish to demonstrate how systematic instruction in writing for first-year German learners benefits from a simultaneous focus on form and content. Students require practice and instructor feedback to improve writing skills. All too often, however, student writing assignments focus on the grammar product, abandoning the student to figure out on his/her own how to create a writing and editing strategy which will result in a successful written product. This approach to producing a levelappropriate essay can be an exercise in frustration for students and instructors alike and is in essence no more than a redundant level check, devoid of teaching and learning goals. The focus on product results in a further complication for students: there is no clear evidence that instructor error correction as the primary channel of feedback provides students with a key to creating a successful writing for themselves (Melin). Our experience is that a communicative approach, a approach, and grammatical accuracy can be at home in the same program; this paper will describe one approach to computer editing that combines all three. It is our intention to show how to teach editing skills for grammatical accuracy to first-year German learners, to do so in the target language, and to demonstrate how editing can become a key component in a communicative, proficiency-oriented program.