While few business people dispute the importance of carefully crafting persuasive, demanding, conciliatory, and bad-news letters, the regular flow of routine communications receives very little meaningful consideration or scrutiny. These routine communications (letters, inquiries, requests, collection letters, complaints, confirmations,…

An informal study explored the dynamics of the task of writing college application essays, which urge self-revelation but are judged by omnipotent admissions committees. Four students in the top 17% of their class of 194 in a predominantly white suburban school completed think-aloud protocols as they drafted a response to an application question…

Understanding the rich variety of personality differences can help teachers to avoid using new technology in ways that separate students from their best sources of strength. Twenty freshman students who were asked to react to 16 statements about writer's strengths and weaknesses not only answered very predictably according to their (Myers-Briggs)…

Creative writing has fallen out of favor with teachers of composition because they have tended to link creative writing to the belletristic tradition of the nineteenth century. But if the nineteenth century can be accused of taking invention out of the writing process, as many scholars have asserted, it is possible to assert that the twentieth…

A writer and educator with an obsession for writing and a concern with the teaching of writing demonstrates how all writing, in many different ways, is autobiographical and that autobiography grows from a few deep taproots that are set down into the past in childhood. Autobiography (described as the way an individual makes meaning out of his or…

A study examined the instructional benefits of a semester-long letter exchange between first graders and preservice teachers in a language arts methods class. When first graders exchange letters with preservice teachers, all are involved in literacy events. Pen pals at both levels benefit from this correspondence. Often the focus is on the…

Despite educators' efforts to understand the process of composition, writing remains a mercurial process difficult to see or describe, even partially. Writing is a process even more difficult to grasp when the writer is possessed of a language--Chinese, for example--and must rely on that language to take possession of and write in a second…

This study considered the problem of evaluation--"how do we know when a student is ready to move into the regular college writing classroom." The subjects were culturally diverse students in a basic writing course at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico. Findings suggest that: (1) students in the course do not fit neatly into any…

A study compared two approaches to teaching 38 grade 4 students in Canada to write trickster tales. By integrating understandings from cognitive and neo-Piagetian theory into instructional method, a novel approach to writing instruction was created. The compositions of children taught via this method were compared to those of students who…

In first year college composition classes, teachers often encounter "writing-resisters"--students who enact their disrespect, students who feel they are better off flirting, students who refuse to turn in papers. In addition, there are students for whom writing seems irrelevant. Teachers can articulate to students verbally and in…

A study investigated the writing done by third graders and the processes used when learning to use writing as a meaning-making activity. Four focal students were followed through composing episodes. The classroom was located in a suburban, upper middle class area in Ohio. Less than 3% of the school district population were members of a minority…

The influence of goal setting and progress feedback on self-efficacy and writing achievement was investigated for 60 fifth-grade children (33 girls and 27 boys) from three classes in two elementary schools. The sample included 37 White, 20 Black, two Hispanic American, and one Asian American students. The students received writing strategy…

A comparative, protocol-based study is reported of the first (Chinese) and foreign (English) language writing processes of six postgraduate English-as-a-Foreign-Language students. The study revealed the approaches of the six writers to the task of producing academic written discourse to be very different, and suggested that if composing strategies…

A review of current research in writing to learn in the content areas provides a basis for focusing on instructional strategies, use of text structure frames, and metacognitive writing strategies. Students can use writing to comprehend to learn content area text in a variety of ways based on their particular learning objectives for that particular…

A study investigated the composing process to examine why different types of instruction have different effects on composing products. The study contrasted three treatments: (1) presenting students with models (the traditional method); (2) the general procedures approach stressing freethinking process; and (3) a method stressing task-specific…