Writing is a crucial, interdisciplinary skill that incoming college students need to successfully complete many of the tasks assigned within their coursework. While teaching self-regulation skills for writing has become more commonplace in writing curricula, and research has investigated how students have been impacted by a writing-about-writing…

Discourse-based interviews allow researchers to gather data about a writer's understanding of what informs a task. This method was essential for a research team seeking to understand the impact of programmatic learning objectives on student writing development. Three decisions in the approach to this research project sought to center the student…

Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre…

Positioned within our field's work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that…

Process-based composition pedagogy has ignored the question of "doneness": the criteria used to decide when a piece of writing is complete. This article uses survey results from first- and second-year composition courses to challenge common beliefs about how students determine when writing assignments are sufficiently completed. We find…

Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw's model of…

Describes a first-year composition sequence of assignments using the topic of family to allow students to write essays based on their own experiences. Notes that the sequence eventually requires that students also address connected ideas and then reflect on the convergence of the personal and analytical. (PRA)

Although socio-cultural awareness is an important element of discourse, freshman composition's primary obligation is to provide students with instruction in and practice "owning" a process of writing that foregrounds writing as a rhetorical art. Students should leave the course more aware of and better able to employ powerful, flexible…

In 1866, Alexander Bain proposed that by evaluating unity, coherence, and emphasis (which he brought together under the acronym "CUE"), students could judge the effectiveness of their written paragraphs. One hundred twenty-five years later, the proposition is still central to composition instruction. A review of modern writing textbooks…

Offers arguments for and against making the essay central to the English and writing curriculum. Argues for the inclusion of the essay and discusses personal experiences and feelings regarding essay writing. (PRA)

Students work most productively when they feel free to move back and forth from ignoring audience to addressing it. Students should consider audience as they begin a writing task. Then they should get away from it all and simply write. If they find an audience inhibiting, they should feel free to ignore the idea of audience altogether or alter…

Topic knowledge, discourse knowledge, and contextual awareness are now considered crucial for "good writing" by many writing researchers. It is time for writing instructors to stop conducting composition classes as though substantive knowledge is a far lesser issue than "rhetorical skill." Composition teachers can offer…

In order to explore new ways of talking to and with composition students, an instructor might ask whether visual artists can teach college writing instructors about the composing process and, whether, by stepping outside the discipline, insights can be gained for more effective teaching of first-year writing students. For one instructor,…

The composing processes of four freshmen writers of varying proficiency who had been taught problem-solving strategies for one semester were traced to see whether they would differ in how they set up and followed through with strategic options. Each of the four students produced a think-aloud protocol as he or she planned and wrote an assignment…

Students' writing can benefit not only from pedagogical strategies but also from imagistic thinking. Writing instructors should use images and metaphors to help students heighten their perception of themselves as organizers, to assist them in getting from one place to another within their material, and to offer analogies for the shape of the texts…