There is no single program for improving student writing, but there are common elements of programs that help kids learn to write well. Likewise, there is no professional development program that provides all the skills and knowledge a teacher will need to improve student writing--and, ultimately, student learning--but there are common elements…

Classrooms are filled with students with confident and vibrant voices, and most educators encourage them to use these voices in their writing. Many of the strategies of the process-centered classroom (peer editing, conferences, workshops, in-house publishing) also encourage students to write in real voices to real readers; however, there is still…

Television commercials and print ads have proven to be an effective means of introducing composition students to strategies for analysis and writing. They rely heavily on the eye to interpret images quickly according to fairly reliable habits. They are naturally occurring forms of argument and students have substantial intuitive competence with…

Composition teachers and researchers recognize the difficulty young writers, especially females, face as they enter postsecondary education and attempt to learn the language of the academy. Addressing academic audiences "takes confidence and authority, qualities that are often challenged in women because of their historical exclusion from and…

This paper asks what role "play" plays in writing and how it can help a writer, whatever dread, boredom, skill, or ethnicity he/she brings to writing. Some of the ideas in the paper come from Africa, courtesy of Robert Farris Thompson. In his "philosophy of discourse" discussed in the paper, Thompson speaks of the "big…

Intended to be a practical and useful guide to tapping a child's imagination and turning it into a creative tool for using language for pleasure, this book offers helpful hints for parents who want to work with their children on communication skills. The book presents a step-by-step program that is easy, flexible, and applicable in any home. It…

Deliberately writing badly can be an effective way to learn to write better because knowing when writing is bad is an essential element in knowing when it's good. There are distinct advantages to encouraging students to learn the rules by breaking them. Deliberately doing it wrong removes the threat of failure. Students are playing; they are…

The notion of "Personal Writing" has come under sustained attack from several different directions and for a variety of reasons, yet it is a concept that still retains usefulness for writing instructors. One problem with personal writing is that frequently students do not like it or feel it invades their privacy, despite the traditional…

Based on extensive interviews, this book investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university. The book focuses on: (1) the writing strategies of 35 women from 5 different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and 4 academic ranks (seniors,…

Aiming to make the literacy tutoring task as easy and effective as possible, this guidebook presents a set of strategies that tutors can implement immediately as they begin to work with students and provides enough information about the elements of literacy learning and effective instruction so tutors can make sensible decisions about the best…

This study investigated whether music could be used as a tool to motivate students with emotional disturbances to develop positive attitudes toward writing and whether these attitudes would result in a higher volume of writing output and improved writing skills. The research focused on two fourth-grade male students. The data collection instrument…

This collection of materials, a summary of a workshop, is divided into five sections, framed by introductory and concluding remarks. The sections are: (1) a panel on "What Is the Domain Beyond?"--panelists discussed their particular interests in areas that could not be traditionally classified as "cognitive" and related those…

This bibliography offers detailed summaries of five articles (published between 1983 and 1993) that provide practical and theoretical advice on designing writing assignments that can serve as more than just evaluation tools. The articles summarized in the bibliography confirm common sense but also dispel some common misconceptions about student…

Getting students to react to literature and write more than a good "topic" sentence is a perennial dilemma for teachers. A course at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont, that incorporated improvisation with the writing process used role playing to solve real life situations, physical and verbal warm-up exercises to…

A study explored how students of differing writing abilities (high, middle or low) approached a revising task that called for both editing (surface level changes) and revising (meaning level changes) and the effect that marking error location had on students' ability to detect and correct the two kinds of errors. Subjects, 12 seventh graders, were…