The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the first of the three recommendations: Explicitly teach…

Because MediaWiki is not appropriate for use in the classroom setting due to its decentralization, arbitrariness, and sharing, its flexible characteristics complicate concepts of practical design when applying MediaWiki in a mandatory writing context. This dissertation identifies a need to add extensions to facilitate increased accountability,…

In the first edition of Writing for Publication: An Organizational Paradigm (Buttery, 2010), I recommend a model for organizing theoretical articles. The process includes seven components: title, introduction, outline/advanced organizer, headings, transitions, summary and references. This article will focus on the writing process. The strands of…

Post-secondary writing teachers in composition and English as a second language (ESL) writing programs are likely familiar with multi-draft composing. Both composition and ESL writing programs share nearly identical multi-draft models despite the very unique and different cultures of each group. We argue that multi-draft composing as it is…

Argues that scientific style manuals provide much sound advice, but also pass along advice at odds with recently published literature regarding how scientists actually conduct research and write up their findings. Presents a revised model for the scientific article based on information in recently published research on communication in science.…

Suggests that the use of visual models in writing technical material can affect the order of the entire writing process and uses a case study to explain how a model is developed, what purposes it serves, and how it affects the writing process. (DF)

The use of a Jonathan Schwartz essay as a prose model to teach writing lends itself appropriately to classroom discussions on various aspects of autobiography and general narrative design. Such use has proved to be particularly helpful with young writers because of its deceptively simple style and language and its use of a variety of sophisticated…

Writing is an act of self construction. Considering how students process information can improve the quality of instruction in composing courses, but only if quantifiable, verified models of cognitive functions are taken to heart and applied to teaching methods in the classroom. C. G. Jung's model of the four functions (thinking, sensation,…

Describes a busy executive's writing process when writing a report for a board and points out its similarities to writing demanded of students. (EL)

Discusses the connection between editors and teachers. Describes the author's editor, who focuses on helping authors meet the expectations of gatekeepers. Discusses how professional writing teachers might use the author's editor as a teaching model (helping students write for actual audiences and teaching more about the text-production process),…

Notes that creating focus which leads to formulating a thesis is a task with which many writers have trouble. Describes a process model of conceptual development that helps students gain confidence in abstracting, conceptualizing, and formulating a thesis. (NH)

Analyzes think-aloud protocols with native speakers of English learning French or German. Shows that as the writer's experience with the language increases, fluency increases, the average length of strings of words proposed between pauses or revision episodes increases, the number of revision episodes decreases, and more of the words proposed as…

The articles in this journal issue present a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches to helping students benefit from imitating products and processes of writing. The eight articles discuss the following topics: (1) imitating models, (2) summary writing as an aid to using writing models, (3) rewriting "Indian Lad" to show how to imitate…

Advocates modeling as an appropriate approach to teaching composition, provided teachers select models carefully and present them as paradigms of dynamic processes and as hints leading to avenues of discovery. Uses N. Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain" to illustrate how such a model can be used to assist student invention. (RBW)

Each student has personal fears, anxieties, and insecurities about writing, which are productive only insofar as they force students into a reevaluation of the ways in which they perceive writing. Approached logically from a nonadversarial position, writing fears can easily be dispelled. (MLW)