Students with learning disabilities (LD) often experience difficulties in writing fluently and using a diversity of words. To help these students, specific and effective writing strategies must be incorporated into instruction and demonstrated to them through modeling. This study examined the effectiveness of using a story map and story map…

The writing teacher's foremost job is leading students to see the valuable ideas they have to express. Writing is a way to share those ideas with the world rather than a way to be wrong, Anderson asserts. Teachers and parents too often focus on errors in student writing. This focus gives students the impression that writing well is about avoiding…

Offers a modest new taxonomy for rhetorical heuristics for arrangement, one of the five major divisions of classical rhetoric. Suggests schemes suitable for academic discourse, such as "obvious before remarkable,""literal before symbolic," and "explanation before complication." Supplies a limited theoretical context…

Depicts how any word chosen by chance can function as a magical word to exhume fields of memory and excite imagination. Details several word games of invention for children (such as the "fantastic binomial," using creative errors, and "Little Red Riding Hood in a Helicopter") that juxtapose normally unrelated words and that can…

Although interest plays a large role in motivation and confidence, we need a clearer understanding of how teachers and classroom practices can influence students' interest for the act of writing. Rebecca L. Lipstein and K. Ann Renninger studied the perceptions of 178 students in grades 7, 8, and 9 to develop this understanding. They offer…

Social-interactive Writing for English Language Learners (SWELL) is collaborative writing based on Topping's Paired Writing Method. The method was changed to meet the needs of English language learners. In both methods, pairs are formed according to proficiency, pairing a more advanced student (a Helper) with a less advanced one (a Writer). The…

Many students find writing extremely difficult and frustrating because they are not able to learn and apply the strategies used by skilled writers. Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is a comprehensive, flexible model that explicitly helps students learn to manage the writing process. An extensive body of research has documented that SRSD…

The majority of high-stakes tests from elementary school through postsecondary education include the timed impromptu essay as a measure of writing performance. For adolescents with writing disorders, this type of evaluation often presents a significant barrier. The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, we investigated the influence of…

To help writing faculty learn the language of discourse communities across campus, we conducted faculty interviews as a first attempt to describe knowledge about disciplinary cultures, specifically with regard to writing. Based on the data received from the interviews about disciplinary definitions and characteristics of good writing and how…

Following less than 8 hr of instruction in the use of strategies to facilitate planning, self-regulation, and revising while writing opinion essays, a group of 3 middle school students with learning disabilities (LD) made substantial gains in each of 5 quality traits on which their papers were scored. On average, posttest scores of students with…

In the act of revision a writer seeks what Joyce Carol Oates calls "points of invisibility": things not in the text that should be and things in the text that should not be. Composing process research on revision has articulated several aspects of the revising process, but study of creative writers' composing habits remains an…

Substantially updated for today's world, this second edition offers chapters on 12 different categories of writing, each of which is briefly introduced with a definition, notes on appropriate writing strategies, and suggestions for using the book to locate topics. Types of writing covered include description, comparison/contrast, process,…

Provides detailed descriptions of how to teach annotation writing to college students, instruction which serves as a unique illustration of the reading process. Provides instruction for eight sessions, and offers descriptions and examples of 10 kinds of annotations. (SR)

Provides analysis of an imaging exercise. Describes how one experience became something unexpected as imaging met imagination. Lists five steps for teachers to use in conducting the exercise. (PA)

Discusses Flannery O'Conner's notion that "stupidity" is a necessary quality for the writer of fiction to possess. Examines the difference between ignorance and stupidity and vicious and virtuous stupidity. Presents pedagogical implications for the teaching of writing. (NH)