Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre…

The authors examined how high school seniors conceptualized the task of writing college admissions essays, the audience for that writing, and themselves as potentially college-worthy writers. In a survey and related interviews, students revealed more emphasis on generic good writing than on the narrative argument genre that college admissions…

Perspective taking, one's knowledge of their own mental and emotional states and inferences about others' mental and emotional states, is an important skill for writing development. In the present study, we examined how perspective taking is expressed in writing and how it is related to overall writing quality. We analyzed seventh graders'…

Perspective taking, one's knowledge of their own mental and emotional states and inferences about others' mental and emotional states, is an important skill for writing development. In the present study, we examined how perspective taking is expressed in writing and how it is related to overall writing quality. We analyzed seventh graders'…

Scenario-based learning is an approach for student-centered learning used in the medical and legal fields, but is little used in liberal arts. In this study, I examine students' understanding and application of audience-centered writing techniques after a semester of formal scenario-based essays and problem-based activities. Comparing the grades…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of two comprehensive argumentative writing interventions--Text Structure Instruction (TSI) and Text Structure Revision Instruction (TSRI)--on the eighth-grade students' ability to compose convincing essays that include structural elements of argumentative discourse. Both treatment groups…

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…