This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

The authors employ hip-hop music as a literacy heuristic aimed at supporting the literacy development of kindergarten and first-grade students. How do young students learn to write hip-hop lyrics? How do young students engage in hip-hop reading and writing processes? The classroom examples show that students engaged in individual and interactive…

This essay introduces a novel way to conceptualize writerly invention -- invention as adopting a non-intentional intellectual stance wherein heuristics are experienced as acting upon the writer as opposed to being enacted by the writer. This view of invention complicates and extends the traditional, Aristotelian view of invention as discreet…

Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

The past four decades have seen dramatic developments in the study and teaching of writing. The result is a body of knowledge about writing that has profound practical and pedagogical implications for teaching, thinking, and learning across the curriculum. This article discusses five things about writing that can have an effect across the…

Of the vexed issues confronting teachers of the first-year writing sequence, none is more frustrating than that of getting students to write in the drafting stages. And not just "to" write, but to write the right thing. The solution that the Composition literature offers to the problem of fluency and content development is process. That…

An assignment given to students at the end of an advanced composition class empowers students by helping them grasp principles and develop abilities that allow them to get beyond needing teachers. The crux of the assignment is a heuristic for analyzing any particular type of writing for the purpose of learning to produce it. The students are…

Describes a heuristic conceit, "the writer's stance," to help students overwhelmed by the complexity and possibilities of a writing task regain control of the process. Stresses the need for writers to select vantage points and frames of analysis for their academic writings. (SR)

The integration of content area writing instruction into the history curriculum has been a slow process. A history course at Ohio University (Athens) offers students experience in writing the type of materials written by practicing historians: book reviews, journal articles, and articles for encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. Such short…