A study explored the connection between reading and writing by examining the writing produced by three young readers of action comic books. The subjects were in grades four and five in a British Columbia (Canada) school and were identified by a survey as being avid comic book readers. During three writing sessions, they were asked to produce…

This study investigated the musical thinking of two composers through the use of concurrent protocol analysis and examinined their problems, funded experience, and reflective thinking. The objective was to determine the extent to which there is an observed or implicit paradigm of reflective thinking in the thinking of a practicing composer. The…

Students at Hume-Fogg Academic High School in Nashville, Tennessee do every kind of writing, have won numerous writing awards, and have published everything from chapbooks to articles in national literary magazines. According to the creative writing teacher, students are first taught to write about things they know--to go back to their own…

A study diagnosed the nature of different text production abilities of Swiss grade 5 and grade 9 students, and of adults, and diagnosed good and poor writers' differences within each of these three age groups. Subjects, 36 in all, were uniformly divided between 11- and 15-year-old students from the Bernese secondary school and high school…

After several years in academic public relations, a professional writer returned to teaching composition. After her first attendance at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, she experienced a turning point in her view of "the essay." Following the conference, she changed her assignments from…

By assigning negative value to egocentric language, Jean Piaget equates depersonalized thought and logic with maturity, and gives disproportionate favor to socialized language. By focusing on the deterministic ends to be gained through the acquisition of socialized language, Piaget misses the value of egocentric language. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,…

Often when teaching creative writing to grade school and middle school students, teachers encounter two problems: students state that they do not have anything to write about, or students keep their poetic voices quiet and imitate the examples that they are given. If students are encouraged to mentally create images of poetic forms and to write…

A total of 47 twelfth grade students from five different English classes and the six teachers in the English department at a secondary school in Canada took part in a study to determine what effects traditional grade-based writing evaluation procedures had upon the process of writing. There were three distinct yet related components to the…

According to James Britton, too much emphasis is being placed currently on revision. In his essay, "Shaping at the Point of Utterance," Britton notes that (1) concentrating on the reader in teaching writing can disturb the writer's ability to formulate what he or she wants to say; (2) the essence of the writing process is not writing…

Intended for composition teachers who see "editor/writer" conferences as the ideal teaching strategy, this booklet offers a procedure for training tutors--staff or students--to respond skillfully to a writer's work in a one-to-one context. The first half of the booklet discusses theory and research regarding the tutorial process and some…

Developing a conference presentation involves both assembling and delivering the materials. In selecting a topic, speakers should consider their own prior knowledge and experience, the topic's interest and significance for them as well as for the audience, and the amount of information available. They can research materials on the chosen topic…

Text headings can be used to structural and expressive advantage in technical material, increasing textual coherence and encouraging reader/text correspondence. The five general types of headings are differentiated by their functions: (1) descriptive headings refer to the most prominent feature of a text section; (2) reflective headings provide…

Although contemporary psychologists generally acknowledge the significance of affect in human experience, few have attempted to understand its role in cognitive processes. The same can be said of writing specialists. In fact, New Criticism, so long dominant in American literary thinking, still continues to influence the emotions writers disclose…

Using James Britton's model of discourse as a touchstone, this paper develops a theoretical base for writing instruction in adult literacy programs. The paper explores writing from an interactionist perspective that views writing as a complex recursive process in which the writer builds meaning with a text according to the purposes for writing,…

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…