Maintains that the author's authentic voice as a writer is "constructed more than it is gushed." Describes how, when the author tinkers with words, when he shifts, cuts, changes, and arranges them to achieve certain effects, it isn't the writing only that he crafts: he is also crafting an identity. Notes how this applies to teaching…

Outlines the author's experience publishing a collection of short stories. Discusses the hopes and disappointments of the process. Notes that persistence and fortitude are required for publishing a book. (PM)

Offers 95 questions for writing teachers to ask themselves concerning their writing habits and the writing instruction they offer to their students. (MG)

Details a review of collaborative styles of professional writers. Notes that some Society of Technical Communication members reported an often hierarchical collaborative process, whereas respondents within the Modern Language Association seemed suspicious of collaboration. Reveals, however, that a dialogic collaborative mode subverting the status…

Suggests, in the context of the author's publishing failures and successes, ways to cope with the fact that judgment and rejection are part of academic publishing. (SR)

Reviews feminist critiques of philosophy and science, and suggests how they may relate to attitudes about the teaching of writing found among academics--humanists as well as scientists--and to the teaching of writing in colleges and universities. Suggests that taking notice of this material will help bring writing courses closer to what takes…

Relates how reading some bathroom graffiti became a literacy incident that sparked awareness of the risk of writing, the importance of purpose and audience, and meaningful engagement with writing. (SR)

Offers suggestions to promote becoming a lifetime writer: build a positive professional attitude toward writing in school; provide extended blocks of time for writing; guide learners in a variety of writing experiences; help writers to "go public"; hand students over to authors through a visiting authors program; and invite parents to be…

Explores the ways students experience contemporary writing pedagogy. Ranges from rhetoric's historical discussion of the pleasures of writing to composition's more recent interest in academic professionalism to Gilles Deleuze's theory of masochism to the problem of teaching and learning in a consumer culture. (SG)

The attribution of low literacy levels among Gypsy children to difficulties of access to schools neglects underlying sociocultural explanations. There has been little analysis in reports/studies of Gypsy attitudes toward literacy, nor of outcomes of acquisition. Informed by new literacy theory and by the discourse of previous ethnographic studies,…

This study examines young children's attitudes toward reading and writing as it relates to the literacy environment in which they had been enrolled. Children (N = 201) attending magnet schools (schools established to address desegregation mandates) in a large urban, midwestern school district were given a reading and writing attitude survey the…

To account for the fact that the average reading literacy in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada) is lower than the national average, a study examined the value that individuals place on literacy. Subjects, 625 males and females, each of whom was a head or one of the heads of households between 21 and 65 years of age and had not participated in an…

Writing instructors who would like to move beyond the collaboration provided by workshops and peer-response groups might consider asking groups of students to write a collage together. According to Peter Elbow, a collage "consists not of a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative but rather of fragments: arranged how…

Notes that because creative nonfiction exists at the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, reality and recreations of reality, and emotional and factual truth, it raises vexing issues. Discusses what carries more weight: the responsibility to a participant in a story or to the larger story of which she is an important part. Wonders if telling…

Describes a 1988 article entitled "Composing as a Woman" as an attempt to reconcile feminist inquiry and composition studies and to persuade composition specialists that the feminist view has a bearing on their field. Explains that a study of the relationship between gender and reading produced a new perspective on student papers. (SG)