Through creative nonfiction, Tom Romano reveals his relationship over the past four decades with Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He has been teaching 40 years, 17 of them in high school, 23 in college. Not a year has gone by that he did not recite to students "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In his…

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail…

In this article, I demonstrate how the use of reflective writing assignments in first-year composition facilitated students' understanding of their own writing process strategies. I first discuss the theoretical roots from which reflective practice among student writers grows. Next, I employ my students' voices to demonstrate that reflection…

The authors are faculty in history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. What their students want and need, and what the institution's role in the community should be, remain open questions, with policy implications at the departmental, college, city, and even national level. Indeed, President Obama…

Applies Burke's dramatistic pentad to the stages of the writing process. (DD)

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…

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…

Guides to assist students in evaluating and revising or rewriting their written works are presented and discussed. (HTH)

Presents a taxonomy of writing instruction, a model or paradigm of the writing process, an application of this model to the teaching of writing, and an explanation of the empirical basis of the model. (Author/GW)

Demonstrates that the second law of thermodynamics imposes a fundamental constraint upon the process of composition; examines the consequences of this constraint for writers and teachers of writing. (DD)

Describes methods for teaching student writers basic principles of organization. Argues that teachers should help their students learn the process of discovering organizations appropriate for their material instead of merely teaching traditional forms of written organization. (HB)

Diagramming composition as a control structure allows us to see the interaction between process and product and to discover that composition is not a linear process but starts and stops, returns and fixes, and moves ahead. In the interaction of three factors--the real world, the writer, and the reader--a text is produced. The objects, social…

Although modern discourse theory asserts that purpose is most fundamental to writing, it is genuine intention that students' writing most often lacks. Assigned topics compel students to write when the occasion is not genuine and there is no real opportunity to communicate. Research indicates that the two principal modes of writing are extensive,…

Argues that discontinuities between sentences can often be explained in terms of syntactic relationships within individual sentences. (AA)

Uses a linguistic analysis of a sample freshman theme to argue that the motivating context must elicit a genuine speech act, that the students must conceive of their themes as semantic units or unified wholes, and that novice writers must learn to become readers of their own writing. (AA)