To investigate the composing processes of professional expository writers, interviews were conducted of six subjects who regularly produced expository prose under the pressure of a weekly or monthly deadline. Subjects included Noel Perrin, essayist, book critic, and Dartmouth College professor; Tom Wicker, political columnist for "The New York…

Eight public examiners in English from the Western Australian Tertiary Admissions Examination marking panel and 103 final-year student teachers graded essays that were experimentally controlled for voice and diction. Control of these independent variables was achieved by providing four rewritten versions of the secondary student essays, each…

Significant findings in recent research concentrate on how writing is taught in school and how it might best be taught. Research on writing over the past fifteen years has shifted emphasis from product to process. The writing process can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Prewriting (everything that takes place…

The problematic results of longitudinal studies on college writing indicate the need for multidimensional studies to be able to explore perceptible changes in students' writing. Accordingly a small pilot case study, to explore the promise and the limitations of doing a longitudinal multidimensional study, investigated whether impromptu essays…

A study examined two writers and their use of word processing and pen and paper in order to set up and draw out the important variables that influence writers' decisions about word processing. Subjects, a college freshman and an engineer, were interviewed about their writing processes and were observed in their natural environment. Results…

A study examined the revision strategies of basic writers. Subjects, one female from Guyana, one from Belize, and one African-American student from New York, were identified as "basic writers" based on performance on minimum competency writing tests. Subjects had their think-aloud protocols recorded as they read and revised a text.…

A study attempted to measure the effects of contingency management, conditions that essentially forced subjects to write, on their writing productivity and creative ideas. Subjects were 27 published college faculty with doctorates, divided into three groups of nine. The first or contingency group participated in a "baseline phase" during which…

This report provides information drawn from a study that compared two components of the freshman English program at the University of Texas at Austin. The first chapter of the report contains background material and describes the two course components--the analytic option, which emphasizes writing skills in the context of complete pieces of…

Indicates through regression analyses that (1) the Ziller, Martell, and Morrison self-differentiation measure and (2) Crockett's Role Category Questionnaire are significantly related and significant predictors of the criterion variables. Found Bieri et al.'s measure to be virtually unrelated to any of the study variables. (JD)

Presents a poem, "Henry and Edith in Casper," and discusses the composing processes that led to its creation. (SRT)

Concludes that handwriting instruction improves writing ability because students who have mastered the basic skills of handwriting are able to concentrate on the process of composition rather than transcription. (SRT)

Uses evidence of common writings found in the Rosenthal Collection of North Italian Documents at the University of Chicago to determine that the type of hand written script most popular in sixteenth century Verona was not the "cancellaresca" found in most copy books, but rather the italic and mercantilist scripts. (SKC)

Analyzes research on the behavior of writers and applies it to the development of writing curriculum. Includes an outline of an example of goals and objectives for teaching writing based on such an analysis. (MD)

Examines the oral interactions between four different undergraduate writers and four different graduate student tutors. Results indicate that the interactions have characteristics of peer and classroom interaction, that they are less clearly oriented than teacher-student conferences, and that they cannot really be considered peer group talk. (RS)

Draws on a research project involving argumentative writing to contend that some student writing problems result not from a lack of familiarity with the academic discourse community but from certain audience postures that were positively correlated with the levels of socio-cognitive development as assessed by the Perry scheme. (RS)