Unlike less skilled writers, who are intensely writer-oriented, skilled writers of personal essays and autobiographies are reader-oriented and demonstrate a conscious concern for their external audience. Student writers can develop a sense of an external audience by analyzing parallel autobiographical text selections of skilled and unskilled…

Discusses ways to empower students through writing, using their own voices, plumbing their own lives for stories, poems, and essays; and engaging them in dialogue with their peers about writing and literature. (RAE)

By following the "steppingstone" or marker theory of dividing one's life into no more than 12 and no less than 8 significant periods, a student in a writing course can develop a brief response for each phase to articulate multiple experiences. Writing teachers can aid students in realizing that important life experiences are the stuff of…

The National Writing Project's (NWP) "30 Ideas for Teaching Writing" discusses making grammar lessons dynamic, using casual student conversation as a source for writing, home language as an assisting tool to attain standard English and other topics by presenting strategies contributed by experienced writing project teachers. NWP does not promote a…