The ability to communicate well through writing has never been more critical. Writing is a necessary skill to make a living and a "life." Even before beginning school, children try to make themselves known by writing. Graves (1983) writes that a child's marks on paper-or a wall-say to the world, "I am" (p. 3). Children are…

Assigning grades is conventionally the exclusive, lonely terrain of the instructor, even as other aspects of responding to student writing are collaborative. As an alternative that promotes student engagement and agency, labor-based contract grading is used in a growing number of writing classrooms. This article describes an alternative:…

In expanding our minor in Professional and Public Writing (PPW), we drew on scholarship exploring tensions inherent in the field's efforts to understand and present itself as a cohesive, yet capacious, discipline. Missing from the scholarship are the voices of students. To fill this gap, we conducted focus group interviews with PPW students at…

We report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their "rhetorical training"--their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in…

Purpose: English teachers who write have valuable expertise that can benefit students. Although there is a fair amount of research on teacher-writers, little is known about teachers' writing lives outside of educational or professional contexts. This paper aims to investigate the writing lives and teaching beliefs of five writing contest winners.…

Scaffolding is a teaching strategy that provides temporary support and guidance to learners as they develop their skills. Through online teaching and scaffolding clinics for novice writers, this narrative qualitative study aimed to assist students and novice writers in improving their scientific paper writing skills. For data collection, this…

This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals' treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters' views on working with…

This study was conducted to examine Thai EFL graduate students' perceptions towards reflective dialogue journal writing (RDJW), their writing fluency as well as self-awareness of their own English language learning and writing development. Thirty-four Thai graduate students aged 23 to 39 were required to carry out the RDJW task for 13 weeks -- one…

Background: Recent models of writing acknowledge the influential role of motivation in writing development. There has been a paucity of research on writing motivation in children. This study investigated writing motivation among Chinese children with developmental dyslexia. Methods: Forty-one Chinese children with developmental dyslexia (RD) in…

This study aims to improve the writing skills, motivation towards writing, and writing attitudes of elementary school students through educational games by eliminating the problems they encounter in the writing process. The study was designed within the scope of cooperative action research, and criterion sampling was used for the sample selection.…

This study attempted to discern the factor structure of the achievement goal orientation and goal structure constructs across the domain-specific task of essay writing in an Iranian EFL context. A convenience sample of 116 public university learners participated in a single-session, in-class study of an essay writing sampling and an immediate…

This study reports on validation of a writing motivation survey and its relationship with a variety of indicators of academic performance of 566 undergraduate students drawn from six US postsecondary institutions. A writing motivation survey was used to capture students' writing goals, confidence, beliefs, and affect. Two research questions are…

While leisure writing may help children to acquire writing skills, it can also be considered as an inherently valuable cultural activity. This study explores how children's beliefs may explain to what extent children are inclined to leisure writing and if there are any gender differences. Building on preliminary scale development work, we analysed…

In recent decades, a wealth of studies on second language writing and plagiarism have emerged, particularly with the increase of international students enrolling in academic institutions that favor English-medium instruction. In most of these studies, the plagiarism-related variables (e.g., paraphrase) under scrutiny are determined by the…

Despite a large body of literature on peer feedback and writing motivation, relatively few rigorously designed, experimental studies have been conducted to explore whether or not peer feedback affects students' writing motivation and which dimensions of writing motivation may consequently change. Using an experimental design, this study explored…