Discusses briefly the challenge of writing the technical documentation for automobiles required by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendment. (SR)

Argues that while creative writing has important lessons to learn from composition in reference to process, pedagogy, and epistemology, composition has significant lessons to learn from creative writing in terms of axiology. Concludes that composition scholars are in a position to imagine alternative configurations that may be more suited to their…

Much of Debra Matthews' teaching experience has been with apprehensive writers, and while teaching freshman English to primarily nontraditional students, she found that the students were often nervous about the writing process. The students acknowledged that they felt threatened by the evaluation process, and some were intimidated by the writing…

What does it mean to take a writerly approach to research? Sondra Perl and her co-authors have pondered this question over the past five years as they have each worked with her to design and draft dissertations that combine their work as literacy researchers with their love of writing. Each of them has moved toward storytelling as a compelling and…

Novice researchers are expected to participate through writing in the particular discourse community in which their research is located, yet if they come from other languages and other academic cultures and traditions than those of the education provider, they may experience the process of writing as the process of silencing their voices. Many…

This article discusses the work of Lucy McCormick Calkins, an educator and the visionary founding director of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Begun in 1981, the think tank and teacher training institute has since trained hundreds of thousands of educators across the country. Calkins is one of the original architects of the…

Only a few instances of empirical research examine what the students themselves think of their participation in peer review. Perhaps because peer response is practically instinctive to those who teach writing, few have felt the need to study the student perspective. Instead, studies have focused on the quality of peer comments, their effect on the…

A writing process of five stages, setting the topic and goals, planning the outline, organising the structure, building the content, and reviewing, is proposed to guide hypermedia authoring. To explore the effects of the system designed with writing-process guidance, this study enrolled 108 seventh graders at a junior high school as experimental…

Experiential learning is a time-honored approach that can help to "...seal the bond between the learner and the learned." Such learning encourages the making of meaning from individual and shared experiences and helps abstract concepts to become relevant to the learner. The 20th century educational theorist, John Dewey, articulated a…

Narrative case research has been widely utilized in educational inquiry to investigate different and changing positions and perspectives on questions of identity, curriculum and classroom practice. Despite the fact that case-study research of this kind is well suited to the investigation of changing technologies and their interpretation in…

Students are entering a workforce that demands competency in writing both for explicit communication through e-mail as well as in products in the company's day-to-day dealings. Strategies for teaching students to communicate in writing have been evaluated extensively in a face-to-face environment. Many of those successful strategies have been…

While formal, standardized assessment instruments provide valuable and necessary information about students' various abilities and skills, the use of informal and qualitative assessment approaches has the benefit of leading directly to instruction based squarely on an individual student's needs, strengths, and existing skills. This article…

A writing workshop is a pedagogical tool that can create a more productive experience for teachers and students alike. Business students who have used this technique with experienced instructors agree that a well-planned writing workshop can be useful for dispelling writing fears, furthering understanding of business communication skills,…

While plagiarism is often viewed in terms of ethical binaries, scholars in composition studies have recognized plagiarism as part of literacy practices governing identity construction. In this light, what is at stake is how writers construct identity by positioning stance-claims according to the standards of respective discourse communities. For…

Wiki empowers users in generating, revising, and organizing their own content. In this study, we review literature to gain theoretical support for wikis that impact learning. In a context of student journalists learning news writing, we design a two-phase field study: (1) Phase I--to examine learners' reflections on learning news writing in wiki…