The current study aimed at investigating the effect of using the story-mapping technique on developing tenth grade students' short story writing skills in EFL. The study attempted to answer the following questions: (1) What are the short story writing skills needed for tenth grade students in EFL?; and (2) What is the effect of the using the…

Managing to communicate one's thoughts and ideas coherently and fluently remains a challenging task for native and non-native student writers alike. This challenge corresponds to the very nature of the writing act, which calls upon multiple and sophisticated cognitive operations. The major aim of this study was to investigate the writing…

In this study, we compared self-revised essays to timed writing exams written by students in a developmental English course in a community college. Using a multiple-trait rubric, we found that self-revised essays showed greater elaboration than timed writing exams, and that elaboration and focus correlated only for self-revised essays. We argue,…

While the college admissions guidebook industry has churned out numerous books and websites telling students what their essays should and should not do, most of those are written by former admissions officers, not by writers or teachers of writing, and almost all rely heavily on providing models of top admissions essays. As a result, students who…

This paper is concerned with the work of Leo Strauss, specifically his two essays on liberal education. Strauss is often claimed to be a founding thinker of neoconservatism and while much scholarship has been produced analyzing his work, very little discusses his essays on liberal education and how these fit within his larger project. This essay…

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and "generous reading." These frames have not been used, however, in cross-cultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from…

Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show how this particular group of…

This study investigated the effects of an expository writing strategy implemented using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development model on the writing skills of four, 4th- and 5th-grade students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Instruction had a pronounced positive effect on students' writing. Student essays were longer and more…

Prior to her joining the California Writing Project's (WP) Improving Students' Academic Writing (ISA) program, the author relates how she used to get frustrated when she read her students' essays. As a result of her new understanding gained from her participation at ISA, the author boldly banished traditional literary analysis papers that asked…

This study investigates the effect of reporting the unadjusted raw scores in a high-stakes language exam when raters differ significantly in severity and self-selected questions differ significantly in difficulty. More sophisticated models, introducing meaningful facets and parameters, are successively used to investigate the characteristics of…

The recent creation of Web 2.0 applications dramatically alters the ways in which universities recruit and educate students. Technology insiders usually attribute the phrase "Web 2.0" to Tim O'Reilly, author and publisher of the ubiquitous O'Reilly series of technology books (http://oreilly.com). Although there is no shortage of definitions of Web…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a retrospective of the career life of Michael Driver, from the time of his Princeton graduate studies and early faculty years at Purdue University through the over three decades he spent at USC. Design/methodology/approach: The history and development of his theoretical and research interests are…

Two studies assessed student writing in a critical thinking course. The first study examined initial and final versions of a term paper. Linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) analyses of essays revealed significant differences in linguistic variables and some differences in cognitive variables. The second study examined student essays at the…

"Creative nonfiction" is gaining ground as the descriptor for what has also been called "the fourth genre." The first word gives some people fits. They get all caught up in "creative" and assume it only means "invented." Instead of using "creative" as the qualifier, some call the genre "literary" or "narrative" nonfiction. Those are both…

In recent years, memoir and the entire genre of creative nonfiction have received some negative publicity and some harsh criticism. Many have dismissed the "fourth genre," as it's called, as a form for the narcissistic and self-involved. Matters certainly are not helped when high-profile writers of memoir are revealed to be frauds and fiction…