Valuable strategies and guidelines for preparing research reports and scholarly manuscripts for publication in refereed journals are presented with the primary aim of helping prospective authors gain acceptance of their manuscripts for publication. The discussion addresses issues such as developing the research idea or problem from a…

Building on Sheen's (2007) study of the effects of written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles, this article investigated whether direct focused CF, direct unfocused CF and writing practice alone produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners. Using six intact adult ESL…

Using the concept of the "constructed child" to reflect on "the child writer," this paper addresses the ways in which educators make sense of what the child does when he or she writes in school. The paper draws upon experiences with 5- to 10-year-old children in a recent study of child writers, especially 8-year-old Ayesha. It…

Exploring the formal and theoretical possibilities available in and through feminist inquiries, this paper investigates the possible impact of feminist theories on three areas of academic writing--the professional, the graduate, and the undergraduate--using a polylogic, polyvocal presentation. The paper explores the theoretical and formal…

This report (a continuation of the Indiana University vocabulary study) identifies words children frequently misspell and analyzes the representative spelling patterns at different grade levels. The report is in three sections and addresses seven questions. Section 1 reports on the analysis of the high frequency words across grades, asking: (1)…

Recent models of metadiscourse proposed by Joseph M. Williams and William J. Vande Kopple are collections of disparate structures instead of principled systems--they do not contain rules to explain the interdependencies of their categories. Metadiscourse should be redefined as a category within the larger context of speech act theory.…

To determine the words that children misspell as they write and then to analyze those words as they represent different spelling patterns at different grade levels, for different proficiencies of writing, and in the context of the essay in which the misspelling occurred, this study examined writing samples from across the country. The study was…

A study examined the effect of word processing on the amount and kind of planning writers do. Subjects, 10 experienced writers and 10 student writers, wrote essays with pen and paper, word processing alone, and a combination of word processing and pen and paper. All students were experienced with computers. The subjects' think-aloud protocols and…

The three papers in this report set forth the research methodology and the theory used in one research project to identify the processes involved in writing. The first paper proposes a method, termed protocol analysis, for use in identifying the organization of writing processes. It defines protocol analysis as a means for examining the detailed…

One segment of a year-long descriptive field study of school writing is described in this paper. In particular, the paper examines some of the uses to which writing is put in the first weeks of school in one second/third grade classroom. In doing this, the paper speculates on the writing curriculum in elementary schools and on the realization of…

This paper explicates and compares theories of composition that use heuristic or problem solving procedures in order to determine what can logically be expected from the application of a particular heuristic during the composing process. The heuristic models examined include E. P. J. Corbett's selection from the classical topics; R. Young, A. L.…

A study examined the written communication at the technical/professional and managerial levels in a "Fortune 500" corporation to determine whether managers/executives had different communications purposes and, therefore, used different rhetorical strategies and approaches than did professional/technical staff. Rhetorical analysis was conducted of…

The contributions made by Donald Graves to research on written composition are examined. Particular attention is given to his case studies of the writing processes of young children. The results of these studies and their implications for instruction are analyzed and discussed. (Author/FL)

Recent studies and theoretical constructs pertaining to textual revision (the process of editing and reformulating written discourse) are discussed. The relative effectiveness of various revision strategies is examined, with particular attention given to different strategies employed by skilled and unskilled writers. Implications for researchers…

Compares two methods for evaluating syntactic complexity and maturity: (1) the T-unit method of W. K. Hunt and (2) the sentence weight method of P. DiStephano and S. Howie. Concludes that sentence weight is no more accurate than T-units, and more difficult to compute. (JG)