This article discusses revisions to personal narrative writing made by Year 7 students (aged 11-12) in a UK secondary school. The concept of strategic revision was used as a basis for analysing drafts and revised texts in order to investigate strategies and techniques deployed by students in the process of revision and how these related to…

This article presents a written version of the address the author gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009. In this address, the author talks about the wonder of writing and discusses how writing has been considered sacred. Reading and writing are associated with inwardness…

One of the best opportunities that undergraduates have to learn to write like a scientist is to write a thesis after participating in faculty-mentored undergraduate research. But developing writing skills doesn't happen automatically, and there are significant challenges associated with offering writing courses and with individualized mentoring.…

This article presents the rationale for and implementation of the family message journal as a writing tool. The family message journal provides multiple opportunities for students to develop as writers while strengthening the school-home connection. This article provides examples of rhetorical moves that indicate young writers are aware of their…

While there is no guarantee that competence in reading or writing results in competence in the other, the skills are related and research suggests that instruction in both reinforces the other. Recommendations strongly support the integration of teaching these skills. Indeed, the integration of all the language arts including speaking, listening,…

This study proposes a Wiki-based collaborative writing approach to the writing process for EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. A five-stage computer-mediated collaborative writing project including collaborative planning, partitioned drafting, peer-revising, peer-editing, and individual publishing was blended with on-campus English…

Citation is one of the most prominent features of academic writing through which academic writers both exhibit the breadth of their scholarship in a specific research area and subtly demonstrate their memberships of the disciplinary community. Citations are important rhetorical devices that allow seasoned writers to promote their current research…

Summary writing has been considered an important aspect of academic writing. However, writing summaries can be a challenging task for the majority of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Research into teaching summary writing has focused on different processes to teach EFL learners. The present study adopted two methods--keyword and…

How do second-language learners become successful readers and writers? This article examines the importance of social networks to English language learners' reading and writing development. It describes different family, peer, and virtual social networks that ELLs can utilize to engage in online and offline reading and writing (especially related…

Taking an assertive stance toward research being reviewed or reported is a challenging task for second language writers. This aspect of interpersonal meaning is especially difficult to address through direct instruction, as attention to particular grammatical and lexical choices outside of contexts of use is not enough to help students develop the…

This study was designed to identify, through mediation analysis, potential causal mechanisms by which procedures of self-regulated learning increase the efficaciousness of teaching young students strategies for writing stories. In a randomized controlled trial with 3 measurement points (pretest, posttest, maintenance), 117 fourth graders either…

A critical focus of effective writing interventions is to help students develop a more sophisticated approach to composing, one that is similar in design to those used by skilled writers. After studying the skills and approaches used by effective writers, Harris and Graham designed the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) approach as an…

This paper starts from the premise that there is more to writing than simply skill, knowledge and ability, i.e. cognition. This is an important part of writing but is only one aspect of it. The paper discusses the idea of the affective domain and goes on to focus largely on the positive and negative attitudes and feelings of graduate students…

Samuel Johnson's oft-quoted saying that "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money" supports the widespread belief that writing is so intrinsically unrewarding that it requires a powerful external incentive to overcome one's reluctance to get on with it. Most academics do not face the strong and immediate pressure to write in order to get…

Students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often experience serious academic deficits. One area that is particularly problematic is written expression. This study assesses the effectiveness of a persuasive essay-writing strategy taught by using the self-regulated strategy development model on the writing skills of 3 high school…