Students who understand their writing process and see themselves as writers are more likely to successfully tackle unfamiliar genres and writing tasks. In this self-study, a college English professor and two first-year college students make a case for an extended-metaphor assignment that helps students build stronger identities as writers.…

Metaphors are known to present both opportunities and challenges for second language learners, but relatively little is known about learners' awareness of them. To investigate this, we analyzed 72 argumentative essays written in English by a group of 37 intermediate Chinese university students of English. We identified metaphors using an…

In this essay, we map out four major approaches to the study of writing experiences: (a) worlds apart, (b) literacy in the wild, (c) ecologies and networks, and (d) transfer. We examine how the primary metaphors used in each approach have contributed to our field's understanding of writing. In focusing on specific dimensions of writing, each…

This method case reports on part of a doctoral investigation into the process of metaphorical language production in second language learners' writing with a combination of computer keystroke logging and stimulated retrospective interviews. The case describes the research procedure and methodological considerations behind each decision in detail.…

Drawing from the research methods of three distinct literacy studies, in this piece, we highlight the visualisation approaches integral to our enquiry processes as researchers working to make sense of literacy and learning. We aim to encourage, provoke even, a conversation about visualisation processes in literacy research by sharing the…

Picture a group of classroom teachers gathered around a table late one afternoon discussing the results of the statewide writing assessment, the returned scored papers scattered across the table top. This article details research exploring which rhetorical elements are associated with statewide assessment scores and considers the role and…

Doctoral students experience many challenges on the long journey towards completion. Common problems include: synthesising data, working at a conceptual level, clarifying the relationship of the parts of the thesis to the whole, finding a voice and completing a viva successfully. Few authors have addressed the use of visualisations to meet these…

This article introduces the "writing metaphor" and examines why political scientists should consider developing one to describe their own writing process. Drawing on the author's experience with writing accountability groups, it defines the components of the writing metaphor, provides an example, and discusses its advantages and disadvantages. The…

Research suggests that experts and beginners use qualitatively different writing processes when given the same text to write. Throughout their writing, experts tend to create a network of executive, structural, and content problems that they continually refine and coordinate as they bring the text to fruition. Novices, in contrast, tend to focus…

Tenure demands for scholarship and publication are increasing, with relatively little research on mentoring junior faculty and less on mentoring to craft journal articles. This qualitative self-study of mentoring experiences of three junior faculty members and their experienced mentor used portraiture methodology to address the research question,…

English teachers have a unique opportunity to expand and develop the way their students think. Too often, students are comfortable in thinking about reading and writing processes in a concrete or linear way. They are used to "right" or "wrong" answers in their other studies and look for the same in their English assignments. While teachers often…

As two faculty members in a Canadian post-secondary teacher education context, the authors inquired into their collaborative writing process initiated through an informal faculty mentoring relationship. Situating their writing in the discourses of personal practical knowledge, social constructionism, narrative inquiry, and autobiography grounds…

This article chronicles the experience of two writers working in digital technologies to write fiction. One writer, the author of the article, describes how her experience writing with the software "Storyspace" influenced her writing of print fiction, changing her processes and challenging her notions of genre. The other writer, a 16-year-old…

Based on the idea that poetry, like any art, is best mastered through practice, this handbook for poets combines poetry-writing exercises with personal essays by each contributing poet. Some of the poets represented in the handbook are: Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, Roger Mitchell, Carol Muske, Sydney Lea, and J. D. McClatchy. The exercises in the…

Scholars have celebrated the spoken word in King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," but they have overlooked the significance of the Letter's writing. In this essay I closely read King's act of writing the Letter, along with the figures of speech he employs in it, and I show how both--by enacting the mass media's ability to cross contexts--are…