Due to the advances of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, new AI-powered writing tools have emerged. They can be used by students among other things for text translation, to improve spelling or to generate new texts. In academic writing, AI-powered writing tools are posing challenges but also opportunities for teaching…

If you think academic integrity is only about student conduct, you may be living in the past. In this opening keynote, Dr. Sarah Elaine Eaton, provides insights from the latest research around the world that shows how academic and research integrity include, and extend student conduct. She'll bring insights from the "Handbook of Academic…

Research was conducted to test the assumption that technical writers compose as other writers do. Information was gathered through questionnaires and interviews surveying 70 writers--technical writing students, students working part-time in industry, university professors, and engineers and researchers working full-time in industry. The results…

Despite the fact that social constructivism is accepted as the guiding theory in Composition, that this theory is the field's theoretical center of gravity, it does not account for, nor explain, the entire writing process. Two major challenges to social constructivism must also be considered in theoretical discussions: (1) the cognitive dimension…

The study of composition is in need of a methodology to teach students about the creation of evidence and the epistemological role that it plays in all writing. For many students "evidence" is an absolute, an assortment of facts found in encyclopedias, graphs, tables, census studies, surveys, almanacs, and so on. For most instructors,…

One of the most useful models of the composing process is that derived from an interpretation of the rhetorical triangle. This basic model implies the relationships between the writer's subject, background, and audience, but it also points to the specific writing functions that underlie these terms. For example, in conceiving a subject, the writer…

An important aspect of the composing process is the element of organization--the coherent development of ideas and considerations of relevance. Most investigations of this aspect have focused on prewriting behavior or on "heuristics,""frames," or other approaches that presuppose that organization is something imposed from the…

This paper addresses the significant role that writing plays in research. It argues (using the form of 10 email conversations between the authors) that too often writing is oversimplified, consigned to the final "stage" of a research process and designated as "writing up." Research methodology texts and websites rarely discuss writing as integral…

This paper contends that if the teaching of theory is to be liberatory rather than alienating, the process of theorizing and theory writing needs to be demystifed. To do this, the paper first describes a personal experience that set the course of an educator's life--her learning of English (taught to her by her father) in China. The paper then…

If forensic activity is to contribute to student growth and development, careful attention must be given to training and experience in developing ideas. Borrowing from the time-honored premise of invention, forensics educators should highlight argument construction as a foundation in speechwriting practices. Some of the essential premises or…

Reading and writing are complementary activities--if not two sides of the same activity--and together they provide a model for instruction in writing and thinking. The classical rhetorical concept of imitation as analysis followed by genesis provides the connection between classical imitation and the recent reading/writing connections proposed for…

According to Stephen M. North, most of the people in composition belong to a category he calls "Practitioners," so the description is not only applied to the University of New Hampshire (UNH). But if the instructors at UNH are most influenced by one person, it would be Donald Murray, and he is specifically listed as a Practitioner. It's…

An application of reader response criticism, with its abundance of ways of construing readers, permits writing teachers to identify sets of readers for students more effectively than simply exhorting them to remember their audience while writing. Composition teachers can employ the concept of "narratee" (the author's alter ego) as a…

This paper lists and describes inventionist themes that writers and writing teachers can use during rhetorical invention. It defines invention as the process whereby writers discover ideas to write about, and the inventionist as one who focuses on this discovery process, whether that focus be pedagogical or theoretical. The items included and…

Information derived from an informal study of the processes through which students go as they complete papers assigned for class shows that most freshman students spend little time preparing for their writing and use a simple drafting technique in composition. This paper offers a model of the student composing process which is generalized from the…