Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of…

A growing body of academic literacies research has enhanced our understanding of university writing as contested, institutionally situated practice with important consequences, particularly for students as they learn to negotiate the writing demands of university study. Less empirical attention has been paid to the practices of subject academics…

Many academics speak of a "literacy crisis" when referring to student writing standards, often pointing the finger of blame at an overall increase in social networking. The resulting tendency has been for language teachers in higher education to take a corrective, or even remedial, approach to writing fluency. This paper examines…

Although handwriting is often considered a matter of presentation, a substantial body of international research suggests that the role of handwriting in children's composing has been neglected. Automaticity in handwriting is now seen as of key importance in composing but this proposition is relatively untested in the UK and the assumption has been…

Cognitively-based writing instruction for educationally disadvantaged students is examined, focusing on epistemic writing. The object of epistemic writing is to inquire into a particular topic and to familiarize/persuade the reader with the fruits of the investigation. In reviewing the distinctions between novice and expert writers, two models of…

Reports on a study of the writing skills of 51 Italian fourth graders who used word processors for several months. Concludes that word processing can help motivate children and teachers to do more writing and that further improvement in writing skills would occur if the children received writing instruction. (CFR)