To investigate the composing processes of professional expository writers, interviews were conducted of six subjects who regularly produced expository prose under the pressure of a weekly or monthly deadline. Subjects included Noel Perrin, essayist, book critic, and Dartmouth College professor; Tom Wicker, political columnist for "The New York…

A study examined the differences between the processes involved in analytic and summary writing by contrasting student writing of both kinds. Twenty 11th graders, 10 high and 10 average ability writers, participated in two composing-aloud sessions. In one session, the student wrote an analytic essay about a history passage and, in the other…

Outlines two hypotheses about the reasons for obscurity in expository writing and notes that neither accounts for the general results of an exploratory study of the writing of postgraduates nor for the individual cases presented. Argues that a crucial factor is a person's implicit model of expository writing. (FL)

This report examines the composing processes of expert writers to determine which cognitive processes in expository writing produce an opportunity for a creative response. The first section considers how the ill-defined nature of many writing problems and the cognitive processes experts use to solve these problems interact to provide an…

A case study investigated how writers use information from reading for writing. Specifically, it examined what happens when writers are asked to read about an unfamiliar topic and then use that information to write an argument. A student was requested to complete four tasks that represented stages one might go through to write an argumentative…

A research project was undertaken to (1) identify the major cognitive processes involved in expository writing, (2) test a model of the organization of those processes, and (3) identify teachable aids that could be used by poor and average adult writers to improve their writing skills. Subjects were expert and novice student writers at…

An examination of student papers from three universities on the same tasks revealed that expository writing tasks were less demanding cognitively than argumentative writing tasks and that argumentative writing tasks were less demanding than speculative tasks. Another finding was that when students were able to translate a generalized task into…

Investigates the thinking processes students employ and the text structures they produce in analytic writing. Contrasts eleventh grade students' analytic and summary writing using think-aloud protocols and examination of genre conventions governing students' writing. Concludes that in analytic writing, students employed more varied and complex…

To determine students' metacognitive knowledge of the expository writing process, a study analyzed fifth and sixth graders' declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge by means of group questionnaires and individual interviews at all stages of their participation in one of three year-long writing programs. The programs emphasized social…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The nine titles deal with the following topics: (1) the effects of syntactic differences between oral and written discourse on the reading comprehension of second and fifth grade students; (2) the effects of a sentence combining…

Presents a study in which first grade students wrote about what they had learned or discovered at their math learning center. Suggests that students who learn actively by writing in a journal acquire ownership of the information, and that reflecting on information is more effective than transcribing and reciting. (JC)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) cognitive predictors of writing ability, (2) peer evaluation and teacher evaluation of the first drafts of high school compositions, (3) writing as a tool for…