Through reading and reflecting on the words of Atwell, Rief, Moffett, and Graves, Maltese began to think like a teacher-researcher, and questioned her writing workshop practices. Once she began to consider audience as a motivating factor, writing became more meaningful for her students, encompassing a wide range of possibilities. Working from a…

Student peer review has proven an effective technique for improving student writing in both English and business communication classes, yet the technique is not widely used in business courses other than business communication. In this article, the author discusses using student peer review in business classes to improve students' final written…

This meta-analysis examined whether writing about stressful experiences affects health care utilization (HCU) compared with writing on neutral topics or no-writing control groups. Randomized controlled trials of 30 independent samples representing 2,294 participants were located that contained sufficient information to calculate effect sizes.…

The diversity of students in today's classrooms has highlighted the need for teachers to recognize differences in the way students learn to write, as well as in the cultural and social experiences they bring to the learning situation. This article profiles three students and demonstrates how they constructed and revised their writing in different…

The article focuses on Fraser Institute's (Vancouver, British Columbia) "Report Card on Elementary Schools in British Columbia." The rating of a school is based on reading, writing, and numeracy levels for both Grade 4 and Grade 7 students, gender differences in reading and numeracy in Grade 7, and the percentage of students not meeting…

The authors examined the effects of writing about the benefits of an interpersonal transgression on forgiveness. Participants (N = 304) were randomly assigned to one of three 20-min writing tasks in which they wrote about either (a) traumatic features of the most recent interpersonal transgression they had suffered, (b) personal benefits resulting…

This cross-sectional study drew on verbal protocol data to analyze the purported problem-solving nature of formulation processes. More precisely, our aim was to explore the allocation of composing time to problem-solving formulation processes in relation to 2 independent variables: (a) the language of composition (i.e., native language [L1] vs.…

I invite and encourage students to take risks in their writing, to engage innovatively with a wide range of genre, to push limits in order to explore creatively how language and discourse are never ossified, but always organic, how language use is integrally and inextricably connected to identity, knowledge, subjectivity, and living. Informed by…

Mel Livatino had stopped attending Conferences on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), but this year one came to his hometown, so he attended and now reports back. Where once the 4Cs had offered helpful insights into teaching kids how to write, today frivolity and radicalism reign. Professor Livatino's notes paint a very precise, largely…

Although the use of computers in secondary school writing centers has been pioneering in some instances, it has at other times been problematic. It is important to be clear at the outset that using particular technologies for the sake of those particular technologies is a bad idea. While technologies are always present in our lives, they are…

Writing centers offer students the means to success. The Reading Writing Center (RWC) at University High School in Orlando, Florida, serves a diverse population of more than 3,700 students. The center serves dual purposes. A classroom side operates as a demonstration space where the author, who is the center's director, leads and sometimes…

With persistence and an enthusiastic approach, teachers can lead their students to discover writing as a creative outlet and a communication tool, a way of transmitting the scenes inside their heads to the world at large. Written language, with all its conventions and complexities, of course takes years to master. But it must have a beginning.…

Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students' awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others' words and ideas in their texts.…

Many approaches to literacy instruction treat language as an object of study. The curricular assumptions that inform such instruction are that language is located outside the person, extracted from context, neutral, and explicable through defined rules. An underlying assumption in many language arts classrooms is that children will not pay…

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing,…