Reviews Linda Brodkey's prominent critique of the image of the solitary writer, and uses it as a means to examine the identity and behavior of the writer in nature. Uses various nature writers as exhibits, and speculates as to why Wendell Berry makes a distinction between "writer" and "creature." (TB)

Describes how a class of first and second graders decided to make cautionary signs to protect their newly constructed projects. Notes that most signs could be classified as persuasive or regulatory, and how some were in the mode of engagement and surprise. (SR)

Recounts the author's writing of "Owl Moon," an award-winning children's book. (MM)

Defines magic as a process of inducing belief and creating community rather than as a product of an otherworldly incantation. Provides an historical survey of pre-Enlightenment relationships between magic and rhetoric. Proposes that the rise of current-traditional rhetoric coincides with the destruction and disappearance of the magical…

Details the "technical documentation process," a basic five-step process for managing technical documentation projects: assessment, analysis, design, development, and validation. (SR)

Establishes a practical model of the document-development process for writers in nonacademic settings. Pulls together and builds from recent research about writers and writing in the workplace. Reveals the process to contain both linear and recursive elements. Asserts that writers must be involved early in the process. (SR)

Offers a narrative on the therapeutic benefits of writing poetry which examines the creative process in relation to reading misperceptions and to useful delays in word retrieval. Suggests that a particular learning disability may signal a creative capability. (SR)

Discusses the role of incubation in the writing process. Suggests that one secret to coming up with good ideas in writing is understanding the importance of realizing that the process entails patient revision, takes time, and often requires some time off task. (Author/VWL)

This article addresses the issue of basic writing, demonstrating how one university's basic writing program acts as a steward of writing. The assumption that basic writers only consume resources rather than contribute to academic excellence is rejected. What links the author responses to this issue is a publication of student writing entitled…

With more frequency, writing associates (WA) are being placed into courses where the goals for writing include learning to write for a particular discipline. As WAC directors we negotiate the different expectations from professors and students that exist within this context. This article introduces a two-year case study of an introductory biology…

How do beginning and skilled writers compose a text in the course of time? To gain insight into the temporal aspects of planning and translating activities during writing, this article examined writing in real time and analyzed pause time patterns in writing in relation to linguistic characteristics of the written product. Fourth-grade children…

The increasing diversity of students and the pedagogical issues that such differences bring to the classroom is a challenge for early childhood teacher education programs today. In the early childhood education classroom, culturally and linguistically diverse teachers are sought after, yet these same diverse teacher candidates find it difficult to…

Over the last decade, most studies in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) have highlighted how online synchronous learning environments implement a new literacy related to multimodal communication. The environment used in our experiment is based on a synchronous audio-graphic conferencing tool. This study concerns false beginners in an English…

In this investigation mixed methods were used to examine flow within the context of a writing task. Forty-four secondary students aged between 15 and 18 years completed a computer-based writing task requiring them to examine information and then write on one of two topical issues. We examined the level of agreement between end-of-task ratings…

One indispensable task in the doctoral undertaking in the humanities and social sciences is that of reviewing the literature. To many graduate students, finding the "right" direction of reviewing is a particularly grueling experience, a practical concern seldom addressed in thesis manuals and studies of the doctoral thesis. This paper is an…