This article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore the writing lives of students as part of a larger project focusing on participants' experiences of writing within and beyond the university. We explain this innovative, iterative research method combining multiple texts and maps, characterizing it as…

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…

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…

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in…

With the recent rise of sociocultural theory in second-language acquisition, attempts have been made to understand L2 learners' uses of different resources in writing, based on their cultural, historical, and institutional contexts. In line with L2 writing research within the sociocultural paradigm, this study investigates the writing strategies…

Warns that researchers should be wary of student writers' accounts of their writing processes. Suggests that reasonable, coherent, even captivating accounts are limited by problems of attendance, memory, and reporting and may not be based on recall but on other cognitive processes. (FL)

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…

This report presents the findings from a 2-stage, multi-method study conducted in 2000 and 2001 on the editing skills and processes which students at two schools in New Zealand used when working with word processors and with pencils. The study's main aim was to examine the influence of the use of a word processor on students' editing processes and…

Interviews Linda Flower, who discusses her beginnings as a researcher, her insights into the role of context in the composing process, her work with classroom teachers, her present involvement with community literacy projects, and how her ideas and research have changed through time. (MG)

Presents an interview with James Britton, author of the book "Language and Learning." Discusses poetry and writing, revisions to his book, the relationship between teachers' classroom experiences and the writing of stories, and the practical application of research and theory. (PRA)

Reveals Donald Murray's philosophy regarding the composing processes including the relationship between drawing and writing, and his response to the changes taking place in the field of composition and composition research. (NH)

The article presents findings from a research project that investigated young, fluent writers' revision practices. The project adopted a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews based on the students' written scripts. This article focuses on a small sample of children and profiles the extent of their ability to reflect on their…

It is recognised that verbal texts do not result only from words. They may involve the mental manipulation of other modes of representation such as images and sounds. If this is the case, we must consider what is not operating with writers who find it extraordinarily difficult to produce verbal texts. Are they failing to mentally code or…

Relates interviews with 17 writers in 4 departments at a major insurance corporation. Describes the writers' frustrations and challenges, the reasons for not collaborating, their reasons for not needing written standards, and their document approval process. (PRA)

In investigations of the second-language writing process the aim of interviews and questionnaires has often been to find shared difficulties among them. However, in practice some writers are more successful than others. The aim of this study is to examine how some writers succeed in mastering scientific discourse in English, in a non-English…