The process of writing a term paper requires certain necessary steps. This guide offers specific and practical directions for writing a comprehensive term paper on any subject and addresses the three main concerns: the procuring of information; format and organization of the paper; and reading and proofreading the paper. Step-by-step examples are…

For one instructor, her work in autobiography began with an interest in understanding how her past has influenced her present work of teaching. Autobiography is an interpretive act and both a reunion and a release from the past. While there is commitment to truth in writing an autobiographical text, the autobiographer necessarily engages in the…

In "Discourse in the Novel," M. Bakhtin notes that writing and speaking are both fundamentally social acts--every utterance "exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions" until the writer/speaker is able to appropriate it as her own. As an institution, the writing center enacts…

According to this book, writing is a process of "uneducation," rather than education. The book cites the secret of creativity as subtracting rules for writing, not adding them. Most people are baffled at how to teach this, since teaching and "uneducation" appear contradictory--but experience in Zen meditation, which is…

There need be no quarrel between those who believe that writing comes primarily from an individual's discovery of selfhood and those who believe that writing is primarily the result of social interaction. Two theoretical perspectives are helpful in considering this issue. The first, presented by D. W. Winnicott, suggests that an infant learns…

Modes of writing utilized within school systems leave little room for students to infuse personal perspectives as objective and formal expression are given higher merit. This approach has marginalized students and created environments not conducive to the process of written expression. Heeding the educational movement of experts in the discipline…

Even though increasing numbers of blind students have been attending schools and colleges, little research has appeared specifically on the writing processes of blind writers. This paper presents a case study which developed a preliminary process account of the composing techniques of a blind executive who administers a medium-sized social service…

Presenting highlights from the past decade of East Central Writing Centers Association conferences, this book addresses the questions of how writing conferences foster the development of writing ability and how teachers can give students control of their own writing and of the writing conference and thus promote higher-order thinking. By providing…

Kenneth Burke suggests that language operates from ultimate motives centered around "god-terms" through terministic screens. God-terms represent the strongest terministic screens in any culture: they screen attention to selected realities while screening or deflecting away others. A model of composition can be constructed from these…

To make writing public, the writer must have an audience. A cooperative and caring environment that invites children to share and respond is the type of supportive environment in which children's reading and writing can flourish. Children who have not published do not write for an audience, but instead write for a critical reader--the teacher.…

This paper contains three parts. Part 1 consists of a poem, "An Apology for Performative Writing." Part 2, "The Traditional Scholar's Game--An Argument," discusses the arguments regarding performative writing. It identifies several key arguments both for and against the works that cluster around such labels as performative…

At the high school and college levels, teachers tend to teach to their own learning styles because they find comfort and ease using methods they know. Students, however, exhibit a variety of learning styles. A questioning process led some teachers to analyze their students' problems further and to consider various categories for which they…

An ethnographic study examined the impact of a writing workshop on non-academic writers. Subjects, 11 adult non-academic writers who wrote little, were seldom around others who did, and did not think they were good writers, participated in 10 Saturday sessions conducted in a bookstore in a rural town. They wrote narratives on self-selected topics…

Electronic mail-based tutoring of undergraduate writing students upsets the temporal basis of the face-to-face paradigm for writing tutorials. Taking place in real time in a specified place, the face-to-face tutorial session has a beginning, middle and end. Further, the session must have a tangible point. By contrast, in on-line tutoring, time is…

By meeting with authors and discovering what inspires them, students can gain insights about the act of writing and also come to realize that even professional writers experience joys and frustrations when developing their craft. Authors provide natural contexts that help students to improve their reading and to enrich their vocabulary. Parents,…