This article discusses the work of Lucy McCormick Calkins, an educator and the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the…

A writing process of five stages, setting the topic and goals, planning the outline, organising the structure, building the content, and reviewing, is proposed to guide hypermedia authoring. To explore the effects of the system designed with writing-process guidance, this study enrolled 108 seventh graders at a junior high school as experimental…

Peer-response remains a central process in first-year composition; faculty can make it effective and efficient by "spotlighting"--designing the process as digital, emergent, and distributive. In this article, the author first elaborates on his own use of peer-response terminology. He favors "peer-response" as the descriptive term for…

Experiential learning is a time-honored approach that can help to "...seal the bond between the learner and the learned." Such learning encourages the making of meaning from individual and shared experiences and helps abstract concepts to become relevant to the learner. The 20th century educational theorist, John Dewey, articulated a…

Argues that rather than intervening with one "ideal" composing style, teachers should acknowledge a number of effective overall composing styles--as well as options for performing each composing activity--to produce more flexible and resourceful writers. (HTH)

Discusses the roles that writers must assume during the writing process and offers suggestions to help children prevent these roles from conflicting or interfering with each other during writing. (HTH)

Notes that those teachers and scholars who are known as the "new rhetoricians" are divided on assumptions about the nature of rhetorical art, with some holding a vitalist theory of art and composing and others holding a technical theory. (HOD)

Argues for using the metaphor of the contract as a principal strategy for teaching students how to craft introductions. (SR)

Presents a title-writing exercise which can be completed in class in 20 to 30 minutes. Asserts that the exercise works for many writers as a strategy for focusing and developing. (PRA)

Shares a Bakhtinian reading of a student paper to illustrate how to help students uncover discourses and their points of intersection and weigh the claims of each as they work toward developing a consciously critical point of view on what they read through what they write. (MG)

Explores practical and theoretical benefits of electronic mail in a creative writing program. Practical benefits include creation of alternative writing space, scheduling convenience, and savings on copies. Theoretical benefits include egalitarian communication, blending of formal and informal discourse, increase in student engagement,…

An English writing teacher has helped students acquire control over their writing in varying contexts by focusing on specific strategies that they could apply to different strategies of the writing process. Strategies for inquiry, for drafting and for products can be used with any of the students' writing tasks, which helps them become strategic…

Writing Workshop is an interactive approach to teaching writing as students learn and practice the importance of rehearsal, drafting/revising, and editing their pieces of writing (Calkins, 1986; Graves, 1983). This study implemented a mixed methodology design incorporating qualitative and quantitative analysis (Mills, 2007) by administering a pre…

We compared 56 eighth-grade students who, 28 months previously, had received instruction in strategies for planning and revising their writing, with 21 students of similar academic ability from the same school who had not experienced the intervention. Both groups wrote an expository essay whilst logging their writing activities and completed…

According to Stephen M. North, most of the people in composition belong to a category he calls "Practitioners," so the description is not only applied to the University of New Hampshire (UNH). But if the instructors at UNH are most influenced by one person, it would be Donald Murray, and he is specifically listed as a Practitioner. It's…