This article uses excerpts from poetry, memoir and epistolary genres emerging from research that has utilized close writing practices to interpret the interplay among memory, narrative, and agency. Biographical, historical, archival, and interpretive processes are used to reveal deferred, not noticed, and/or not counted experiences of those…

Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the "tool-based interview" (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington's influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused…

Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular,…

This article presents a revised version of the writer(s)-within-community model of writing. Writing is conceptualized as a social activity situated within specific writing communities. Writing in these communities is accomplished by its members. The model proposes that writing is simultaneously shaped and bound by the characteristics, capacity,…

This article describes a cooperative writing response initiative designed to develop writing skills in foreign/second-language contexts (hereafter L2). The strategy originated from my desire to cater for my learners' need to become better writers in English within a constrained educational environment in Argentina. In this article I describe this…

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures…

The authors suggest that writing should be conceived of not only as a verbal activity but also as a visuospatial activity, in which writers process and construct visuospatial mental representations. After briefly describing research on visuospatial cognition, they look at how cognitive researchers have investigated the visuospatial dimension of…

In this paper, the authors investigate the enduring power of voice as a concept in writing pedagogy. They argue that one can benefit from considering Elbow's assertion that both text and voice be considered as important aspects of written discourse. In particular, voice is a powerful metaphor for the material, social and historical nature of…

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger,…

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers (N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that…

This article presents pupils' awareness of writing as elicited through a metawriting task, in other words a task in which pupils from the third, fourth and sixth forms (grades) were required to write about writing. The analysis of the texts revealed the pupils' increasing ability to write texts focusing on writing and on the subject's relationship…

Drawing on our experience of working in Sweden and seeking to help colleagues enter the prestigious culture of Anglophone academic text production, this article explores the landscape of academic writing and publishing. We first provide an account of the birth of academic writing and the gradual emergence of its present forms. We then explore…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a whole picture book worth? This was exactly the question Pierce School teachers asked themselves when they began the project of compiling a photo library for creating realistic and relevant short texts by and for students across all grades in their K-8 elementary school. In an effort to…

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte's (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities…

This article presents a conceptual framework for the writing process to facilitate motivation, learning, retention, and knowledge transfer in readers of expository material. Drawing from four well-developed bodies of knowledge--cognitive science, learning theory, technical communication, and creative writing--the author creates a model that allows…