The article addresses the multifaceted concept of practice as it relates to writing, drawing parallels to various domains such as sports, music, and professional life. Through reflections on the dichotomy between practice and performance exemplified by Allen Iverson's famous quote, Goldblatt explores how writing is perceived and approached as a…

When pondering how to contribute to this special issue, the author was startled to realize that their career, the journal's history, and the development of the discipline--rhetoric and composition/writing studies (RCWS)--had run in parallel for 50 years. This essay tells a story of how "generation" came to matter in rhetoric and…

Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the "tool-based interview" (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington's influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused…

The insufficient focus on developing writing instruction in education is a significant problem. Despite the crucial link between writing and reading skills and their impact on academic and life success, there is a notable lack of emphasis on writing in schools. Writing A-Z is a digital-first program that helps teachers establish a writing…

Canada's social and educational policies have always involved immigrant settlement and English/French bilingualism. Research on writing in second languages emerged in the 1980s from graduate programs of education and applied linguistics at major universities in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver, particularly done by scholars investigating…

This article proposes that two processes are involved in the generation of content during writing: (a) an active, knowledge-constituting process in which content is synthesized by constraints within semantic memory representing the implicit structure of the writer's understanding, and (b) a reflective, knowledge-transforming process in which…

In Higher Education (HE), writers need to regulate their writing processes in order to achieve their communicative goals. Although critical for academic success and knowledge construction, writing regulation processes have been mainly researched in compulsory education rather than in HE, with no systematic review focused on this context. The…

When responding to a writing task, writers spend a significant amount of their time not writing. These periods of physical inactivity, or pauses, during writing provide observable and measurable cues as to when, where, and how long writers halt to plan and/or revise their texts. Consequently, examining writers' pausing patterns can provide…

The narrow teaching of writing that had been common in schools for hundreds of years was challenged in the 1980s by 'one of the most seductive writers in the history of writing pedagogy'. Donald Graves's process approach to writing, as it came to be known, was popular in Australia, New Zealand, USA and the UK. At the heart of Graves's approach was…

Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers' knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their…

This paper presents a special issue on writing around the globe. Researchers from across the world describe writing practices in their country using a wide variety of methodology. The papers show that while there are many similarities in writing instruction from one country to the next, there are also many differences. As a result, the authors…

The model presented in this article aspires to represent a theoretically valid and coherent definition and description of writing, as a basis for teaching and assessing writing as a key competency in school. It represents a critique as well as an extension of previous alternatives in that it views writing as a culturally and individually…

While the editors of "Across the Disciplines" were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center in 2011, they began focusing on the issues of graduate writing support through their involvement with the graduate writing groups hosted through the MSU Writing Center, conducting research on the benefits of such groups. When…

This article describes the nature of eye-tracking technology and its use in the study of discourse processes, particularly reading. It then suggests several areas of research in composition studies, especially at the intersection of writing, reading, and digital media, that can benefit from the use of this technology. (Contains 2 figures.)

Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…