This article discusses individual writers’ profiles in foreign language writing, with a focus on pauses and their significance in writing processes. The corpus consists of written and oral productions by eleven Finnish university students of French (i.e. second language / L2) and six native speakers of French (i.e. mother tongue / L1). Both groups participated in a test mainly composed of two parts: first, an essay (c. 150-200 words) written on a computer with a program called ScriptLog, which is a tool for experimental research on the on-line process of writing, and second, an oral stimulated recall type verbal protocol where students verbalise in their mother tongue sequences of thought relevant to the task. In order to describe the individual writers’ overall profiles, the pause and its length have to be determined. In summary, it seems that even the pause length that underlies the students’ profiles is individual.