Presents a transcript of an interview with the British logician and philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Covers aspects of his various books. Relates his thoughts to the field of composition studies. (HB)

Reveals Donald Murray's philosophy regarding the composing processes including the relationship between drawing and writing, and his response to the changes taking place in the field of composition and composition research. (NH)

Examines the impact of training in literature on the development of theories of composition. Examines connections between the strategies employed in seven influential composition theorists' dissertations (Linda Flower, Art Young, David Bartholomae, Erika Lindemann, Toby Fulwiler, Lisa Ede, and Peter Elbow) and those strategies used in their…

Considers how a feminist rhetoric can engage complicated notions of ownership and intellectual property. Discusses issues of ownership in writing classrooms. Explores the professional life of Andrea Abernethy Lunsford at Ohio State University. Notes that Lundsford suggests composition must be re-imagined as a field in which a radical individual is…

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions)…

With genre now viewed as a fundamental element of writing, both second language writing and mainstream composition studies have seen an increased focus on the question of how writers learn genres. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from 60 empirical studies that have investigated this question. To this point, research has…

Lexical access and retrieval are essential processes in fluent and efficient second language (L2) oral and written productive uses of language. In the case of L2 writing, attention to vocabulary is of paramount importance, although the retrieval of relevant lexis while composing in an L2 frequently entails different degrees of problem-solving…

This paper describes one academic author's consternation when he came across an annotation of one of his scholarly articles from the "Journal of Basic Writing" in the ERIC database. The paper recounts that the author was disconcerted to find that the annotation was misleading, describing as his main point something that his article warns…

There are four problems in modern composition bibliography that result directly from the continuing research paradigm instability in the field. The first problem is that of definition. Composition is a hybrid, practical sort of field, with very ill-defined and shifting boundaries. The recent extension of composition from "formal writing…

For the 1987-1988 North Carolina Annual Testing Program in the area of writing assessment, public school students in grades 6 and 8 were tested on the composing characteristics of main idea, supporting detail, organization and coherence. A total of 78,045 sixth-grade students wrote a clarification composition focusing on their favorite place to…

Intended to improve the quality of public documents by making them clearer to the people who use them, this book contains document design principles concerned with writing documents that are visually distinct, attractive, and easily understood. Following an introduction, the major portion of the book presents the 25 principles, each of which…

The act of composing is best described as a set of distinguishable processes that interact. There are four methods for researching these processes: (1) behavior protocols, in which subjects are observed but are not asked to report their thought processes verbally; (2) directed reports, in which subjects are asked to explain how they performed a…

A study to determine the effect of audience on student writers' revision strategies involved 13 college students, seven reasonably competent upper-level writers and six basic writers, who were assigned to write for an hour on a uniform essay topic, composing aloud into a tape recorder as they did so. Six of the upper level students and five of the…

A pilot study was conducted to compare the quality of essays written by college freshmen in 1963 and in 1977. Twenty-five compositions from each college year were used. The compositions in the two groups of essays were coded according to each writer's sex, high school ranking, and scores on the American College Testing Program. In this way 25…

To determine if people who wrote legal documents could read such documents with understanding and rewrite them to be understandable to the general public, eight experienced government writers were asked to rewrite a portion of a government regulation for a general audience. The writers--four lawyers and four nonlawyers--were audio recorded as they…