This paper asks what role "play" plays in writing and how it can help a writer, whatever dread, boredom, skill, or ethnicity he/she brings to writing. Some of the ideas in the paper come from Africa, courtesy of Robert Farris Thompson. In his "philosophy of discourse" discussed in the paper, Thompson speaks of the "big…

Intended to be a practical and useful guide to tapping a child's imagination and turning it into a creative tool for using language for pleasure, this book offers helpful hints for parents who want to work with their children on communication skills. The book presents a step-by-step program that is easy, flexible, and applicable in any home. It…

Deliberately writing badly can be an effective way to learn to write better because knowing when writing is bad is an essential element in knowing when it's good. There are distinct advantages to encouraging students to learn the rules by breaking them. Deliberately doing it wrong removes the threat of failure. Students are playing; they are…

The notion of "Personal Writing" has come under sustained attack from several different directions and for a variety of reasons, yet it is a concept that still retains usefulness for writing instructors. One problem with personal writing is that frequently students do not like it or feel it invades their privacy, despite the traditional…

Based on extensive interviews, this book investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university. The book focuses on: (1) the writing strategies of 35 women from 5 different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and 4 academic ranks (seniors,…

Aiming to make the literacy tutoring task as easy and effective as possible, this guidebook presents a set of strategies that tutors can implement immediately as they begin to work with students and provides enough information about the elements of literacy learning and effective instruction so tutors can make sensible decisions about the best…

This study investigated whether music could be used as a tool to motivate students with emotional disturbances to develop positive attitudes toward writing and whether these attitudes would result in a higher volume of writing output and improved writing skills. The research focused on two fourth-grade male students. The data collection instrument…

This collection of materials, a summary of a workshop, is divided into five sections, framed by introductory and concluding remarks. The sections are: (1) a panel on "What Is the Domain Beyond?"--panelists discussed their particular interests in areas that could not be traditionally classified as "cognitive" and related those…

This bibliography offers detailed summaries of five articles (published between 1983 and 1993) that provide practical and theoretical advice on designing writing assignments that can serve as more than just evaluation tools. The articles summarized in the bibliography confirm common sense but also dispel some common misconceptions about student…

Getting students to react to literature and write more than a good "topic" sentence is a perennial dilemma for teachers. A course at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont, that incorporated improvisation with the writing process used role playing to solve real life situations, physical and verbal warm-up exercises to…

A study explored how students of differing writing abilities (high, middle or low) approached a revising task that called for both editing (surface level changes) and revising (meaning level changes) and the effect that marking error location had on students' ability to detect and correct the two kinds of errors. Subjects, 12 seventh graders, were…

A study investigated the impact of a procedure called Thesis Analysis and Synthesis Key (TASK), which was embedded in a curriculum designed to help high school students read and write arguments. Subjects, 120 11th-graders in San Francisco were instructed in argumentation under 3 conditions. Their gains in the ability to read arguments were…

The composing processes of four freshmen writers of varying proficiency who had been taught problem-solving strategies for one semester were traced to see whether they would differ in how they set up and followed through with strategic options. Each of the four students produced a think-aloud protocol as he or she planned and wrote an assignment…

Students' writing can benefit not only from pedagogical strategies but also from imagistic thinking. Writing instructors should use images and metaphors to help students heighten their perception of themselves as organizers, to assist them in getting from one place to another within their material, and to offer analogies for the shape of the texts…

Effective writing is nearly impossible without engagement with the material. The informal journal may be the only place in the composition class which clearly respects and encourages students' individuality, and which cannot be accused of trying to force them into an academic straitjacket of a sometimes loose, sometimes tight, fit. At the same…