This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by many thousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. We seek to…

This article compares essays written in response to the ACT Essay prompt and a locally developed prompt used for placement. The two writing situations differ by time and genre: the ACT Essay is timed and argumentative; the locally developed is untimed and explanatory. The article analyzes the differences in student performance and predictive…

Categorizes the editorial changes on the transcripts of the William Haber Oral Biography Project to better understand how to adapt speech facility to writing. Discusses the implications for writing instruction in terms of voice, tense, and audience. (HTH)

Argues that comparing developments in the process approach to writing and the design methods movement sheds light on the evolution and future direction of the writing paradigm. Argues that sensitivity to the variety of writing tasks and social contexts is more effective than a single amorphous model. (RS)

Discusses the results of a questionnaire given to traditional age and older college students to determine their attitudes toward writing and methods of teaching writing. The results showed remarkable similarities between the attitudes of the 18 to 24 year-old students and the 25 to 50 year-old students. (HTH)

Contrasts two conferences that occurred in the 1960s: one considered significant by historians of composition studies, the other recognized as important in the development of poststructuralism. Argues that theoretical currents associated with the conferences can usefully critique each other. Proposes a variation on the new advocacy of…

Describes the methodology and results of a study of the differences between instructors' evaluations of student papers and the evaluations of other students. The results indicated that instructors and college freshmen use different criteria and stances when judging student work. (HTH)

Assessment, including writing assessment, is a form of social action. Because standardized tests can be used to reify the social order, local assessments that take into account specific contexts are more likely to yield useful information about student writers. This essay describes one such study, a multiple-measure comparison of accelerated…

Compares the efficacy of objective and holistic writing evaluation, in the context of the freshman writing program evaluation procedure at a west coast university. Indicates that holistic evaluation of writing samples is a far more accurate measure of writing quality and potential. (HTH)

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal…

Compares the rhetorical strategies of 20 opening paragraphs from "Psychology Today" to those in 20 first paragraphs from student essays. Observes that professionals regularly begin exposition with narratives, indirection, and irony, while students begin with rhetorical questions, truisms, and muddled strategies. Concludes that students'…