An autobiography class at Elizabethtown College (Pennsylvania) used one of its four technique paper assignments to focus on the exploratory essay, since the concept of exploration, simply for the sake of questioning, probing, and testing, has both validity and purpose in a class or assignment focusing on autobiography. First the class brainstormed…

Students do not need to be told that they are socially constituted so much as they need to experience, in concrete terms, what that means. In an era of identity politics, they need to experience the labels they choose (or the labels chosen for them) as no less problematic than they are inevitable. A means to this end is a classroom heuristic tried…

The personal essay does not rely on the straight, even rows of a carefully laid out vegetable garden, on strings pulled tight to connect beginnings to ends. Instead it meanders, pulls from here and there, thinks out loud, asks questions, and proceeds leisurely through disconnections to make connections, as an ever-changing flower garden in which…

John Keats provides a convincing and helpful model of James Britton's philosophy and research on composition. While, contrary to Britton's paradigm, much of Keats's work is simultaneously in the expressive, transactional and poetic modes, early poems are primarily expressive: they record his perception of reality as filtered through his senses and…

The author's voice is implicit in all writing, even technical writing. It is the expression of the writer's attitude toward audience, subject matter, and self. Effective use of voice is made possible by recognizing the three roles of the technical writer: transmitter, translator, and author. As a transmitter, the writer must consciously apply an…

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…

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…

This report describes "Education 310," a course for the general graduate student population taught through Writing Programs for the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The report describes the contexts and needs that prompted the course; reviews the influences and resources that suggested…

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.…

Although composition theorists have rejected the "alchemy" of the traditional, impressionistic, unscientific view of composition as product in favor of a process oriented approach, they have as yet failed to reach a consensus about the epistemological bases that undergird this shift. An examination of parallel developments in literary…

The complexity of the writing process makes it more useful to isolate a variety of processes or parts of processes that can be taught and learned. A narrow view of writing as product leads to a misinterpretation of the process as a definite sequence--prewriting, writing, rewriting--when in fact it is much more recursive. Proper analysis of product…

Work with 12 students in a basic writing class led to the conclusion that textual analysis alone will not provide basic writing teachers with the information they need to deal effectively with student errors; instead, contextual analysis is needed, an understanding of how students compose and what their guiding concerns and basic problems are.…

Writing teachers can use several techniques to focus student attention on revision and to guide students, revision processes. Asking students to make an outline of what they have already written (after the draft is complete, just before the conclusion is drafted, or when the writer is blocked and does not know what to write next) enables a writer…

The rhetorical inventions of Kenneth Burke can help writers gain new perspectives on their topics and can put new life into the process of learning to write. The pentad, Burke's instrument for interpreting actual and potential motives, can help develop lines of thought that might never occur without some such model. Other inventional systems such…