On their way to a state English board meeting, Susan Kelly, a curriculum director, and Louisa Kramer-Vida, a university professor, used their travel time as an opportunity to converse about pedagogy (McAdamis 2010). Specifically, they reflected about enhancing K-12 writing in a suburban, middle class school district. "We need to introduce a…

Many students with learning disabilities struggle with the writing process throughout their school years. As students approach graduation, effective communication though writing becomes more critical. Writing is a skill that can directly impact the quality of life for older students preparing to graduate and progress to college, a career, or…

While much feedback research in L1 and L2 writing has been conducted in pre-university and university contexts, little attention has been paid to supervisors' comments at the graduate level. Specifically, the nature and role of supervisors' commentary on the writing of graduate-level academic genre is under-explored. Designed to fill such an…

Many qualitative researchers have puzzled over the question of how to write more engaging, more communicative texts. "Why" we write, however, is not often part of our scholarly conversations. In this article, I examine the writing process and position writing as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics.…

On April 25, 2008, students on college and public school campuses collectively committed to a vow of silence commemorating an event known as the National Day of Silence. This student-generated, nationwide action theatrically "speaks out" in solidarity with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people who for one reason or another fear…

Chinese writing is one of the most difficult challenges for Chinese learners whose first language writing system is alphabetic letters. Chinese teachers have incorporated computer-based writing into their teaching in the attempt to reduce the difficulties of writing in Chinese, with a particular emphasis on composing (as opposed to simply writing…

For many secondary students, writing effectively is the most elusive of the critical literacy skills needed for college and career readiness. And for many teachers, revision is the most difficult part of the writing process to tackle. How can adolescent writers be guided to revisit their work, to identify the weaknesses in their writing drafts,…

Feedback plays an intervention role in the writing process. It is through feedback that writers are guided to achieve negotiated writing goals. Feedback encourages a process of discovery and this plays a developmental role in the writing process. In this paper, we report on three case studies that sought to understand cognitive processes when…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…

This study was designed to compare the writing motivation of students with specific language impairments with their non-disabled peers. Due to the cognitive and linguistic demands of the writing process, students with language impairments face unique difficulties during the writing process. It was hypothesized that students with specific language…

Early in his career as an engineering librarian, the author saw plagiarism in completely black and white terms. However, digging into the scholarly literature, he finds ample evidence that there are other factors at work in student writing besides a lack of ethics or the intent to cheat. In this article, he briefly highlights some of these…

The most successful historical arguments are expressed in a voice unmistakeably the author's own, yet this numbers among the most difficult skills to accomplish. In this article, I discuss a series of seminars which I ran in University College London's History Department in order to help undergraduate historians develop their authorial voice. Some…

Most every writing teacher can relate to the curse of reading yet another incoherent essay, the contents of which resemble an unorganized junk drawer of thoughts. Such essays cry out for a main idea. The remedy is a thesis, and teachers rightly take pains to help students discover this. Yet in spite of this, writing teachers ought to bear in mind…

In this article, the author begins with a proposition asking what if visual thinking were privileged in the English classroom and then proceeds to elaborate on a curriculum grounded on three principles: (1) sense and perception as starting points; (2) meta-conceptual links between visual and verbal texts; and (3) the art of visualization in…

Little is known about the effects of various planning and revising conditions on composition quality in experimental or TESOL education research. This study examined the effects of planning conditions (planning, prolonged planning, free writing, and control), subplanning conditions (task-given, task-content-given, and…