Writing Studies has flourished as a field in Latin America during the last two decades. Its development has been fostered by an exponential growth of college enrollments and processes of expansion and democratization of the educational offer in the region. The renewed attention received by higher education writing has fueled new research efforts…

Given complaints about preparation of international students for their writing-intensive courses, a director of first-year writing and an undergraduate researcher at a Midwestern research university conducted a needs assessment based on Kaufman's model. Instruments used included a survey, interviews, and analysis of commentary on sample papers.…

Recent models of metadiscourse proposed by Joseph M. Williams and William J. Vande Kopple are collections of disparate structures instead of principled systems--they do not contain rules to explain the interdependencies of their categories. Metadiscourse should be redefined as a category within the larger context of speech act theory.…

Describes the results of three experiments designed to identify cues people use to paragraph text and to determine whether those cues are semantic, formal, or both. (HOD)

Analyzes spontaneous written expression (sampled from 11 workshops) according to a structured model of Creative Poetry Therapy. Finds similarity in the poetic indicators and in the expression of psychological needs, despite profound differences in the composition of the groups (children, youth, adults). Argues that the healing process of poetry…

In addition to presenting the results of analyses of written texts from a linguistic perspective, this book proposes productive methods for discourse analysis and identifies new directions for work on written communication. The studies presented in the book illustrate the importance of text linguistics and discourse analysis for research on…

A pilot study explored how to teach students to write thoughtfully, and also how to teach computers to recognize and interpret the kinds of thinking that appear in such writings. First, a taxonomy of mental processes was found, next the linguistic expressions (clues) that indicate the processes were hypothesized, and then a professionally-written…

A synthesis of three different writing theories into one model for the writing process is given in this report and evidence is provided for various parts of the model from studies using different methods of investigation. The model developed contains three phases: (1) processing or whiting as discovery, including propositionalizing, subchunking,…

Virtually all composition research has been done about teaching methodology; little research about the theory of the process of composition has been done. A 1964 study, the first on the composition process, used as an operational definition the concept of the composing process as being a series: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. This linear…

To discover what variables are involved in the production of text coherence, and how cohesion and coherence are different, a study collected 30 papers randomly selected from over 200 papers written by incoming freshmen college students at a local community college. The papers were rated by 21 state conference participants. Raters were in-service…

The two current approaches to teaching academic discourse are conventional and collaborative; in practice, they overlap because both are based on a "conversational model" of learning to write in college. Taxonomists and collaborationists disagree on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the various pedagogical methods:…

Traces scholarly constructions of basic writers' identities. Asks what those students who are labeled basic writers are accomplishing in their speech and writing. Offers a speculative model for analyzing basic writing student discourse. Uses that model to examine the language used in a basic writing classroom. Reviews the implications of such work…

When students write syntheses in response to a rhetorical task, does the rhetorical nature of the task exert some special influence on the students' composing processes? How do these processes differ? Three case studies, quantitative analyses of papers written by seventeen undergraduates, and a tentative model of a synthesizing process address…

A discussion of writing looks at research on the factors influencing written discourse and proposes a model of writing for academic purposes. First, studies of both cultural and individual aspects of the writing process are reviewed and the phenomenon of writing is viewed from both social and cognitive perspectives. The social perspective is that…

Combining linguistics and composition studies in a two-part article (in which part 1 presented the principal concepts of cohesion and information management used in spoken and written discourse) this paper, part 2, describes a model that applies some of these concepts in analyses of the content of samples of published writing in three disciplines…