A creative writing class explored the feminine creative powers evoked when searching for the Muse in an attempt to understand women as writers. Female student writers occasionally found "masculine" figures, but predominantly experienced a figure of the Muse that had a distinctly Goddess-linked quality or was not genderized at all.…

Teaching undergraduate students to write required essays for academic courses is the focus of this paper. In a preparatory lecture the instructor explains essay standards and provides instructions for writing essays. An model essay is presented to each class member to be used as a guide for class compositions. The appendix includes an essay of…

In order to explore new ways of talking to and with composition students, an instructor might ask whether visual artists can teach college writing instructors about the composing process and, whether, by stepping outside the discipline, insights can be gained for more effective teaching of first-year writing students. For one instructor,…

Each year that the author of this paper, an English instructor at Moorhead College (Minnesota), teaches the first-year "research paper," one instructor turns more and more to collaborative writing work. And she admits that some of her motives in reshaping the research paper in collaborative ways can seem to be based in assisting herself…

Students, either male or female, can be silenced by the adversarial discourse that often characterizes argumentative situations. Alternatives proposed by feminist rhetoricians should apply to any voice silenced in the classroom. Rhetoricians concerned with empowering writers of argument have illustrated three alternatives that enable writers to…

Classrooms are filled with students with confident and vibrant voices, and most educators encourage them to use these voices in their writing. Many of the strategies of the process-centered classroom (peer editing, conferences, workshops, in-house publishing) also encourage students to write in real voices to real readers; however, there is still…

Television commercials and print ads have proven to be an effective means of introducing composition students to strategies for analysis and writing. They rely heavily on the eye to interpret images quickly according to fairly reliable habits. They are naturally occurring forms of argument and students have substantial intuitive competence with…

Composition teachers and researchers recognize the difficulty young writers, especially females, face as they enter postsecondary education and attempt to learn the language of the academy. Addressing academic audiences "takes confidence and authority, qualities that are often challenged in women because of their historical exclusion from and…

This paper asks what role "play" plays in writing and how it can help a writer, whatever dread, boredom, skill, or ethnicity he/she brings to writing. Some of the ideas in the paper come from Africa, courtesy of Robert Farris Thompson. In his "philosophy of discourse" discussed in the paper, Thompson speaks of the "big…

The notion of "Personal Writing" has come under sustained attack from several different directions and for a variety of reasons, yet it is a concept that still retains usefulness for writing instructors. One problem with personal writing is that frequently students do not like it or feel it invades their privacy, despite the traditional…

This study investigated whether music could be used as a tool to motivate students with emotional disturbances to develop positive attitudes toward writing and whether these attitudes would result in a higher volume of writing output and improved writing skills. The research focused on two fourth-grade male students. The data collection instrument…

A study explored how students of differing writing abilities (high, middle or low) approached a revising task that called for both editing (surface level changes) and revising (meaning level changes) and the effect that marking error location had on students' ability to detect and correct the two kinds of errors. Subjects, 12 seventh graders, were…

A study investigated the impact of a procedure called Thesis Analysis and Synthesis Key (TASK), which was embedded in a curriculum designed to help high school students read and write arguments. Subjects, 120 11th-graders in San Francisco were instructed in argumentation under 3 conditions. Their gains in the ability to read arguments were…

The composing processes of four freshmen writers of varying proficiency who had been taught problem-solving strategies for one semester were traced to see whether they would differ in how they set up and followed through with strategic options. Each of the four students produced a think-aloud protocol as he or she planned and wrote an assignment…

Students' writing can benefit not only from pedagogical strategies but also from imagistic thinking. Writing instructors should use images and metaphors to help students heighten their perception of themselves as organizers, to assist them in getting from one place to another within their material, and to offer analogies for the shape of the texts…