Strategies for effective writing include having clear expectations, developing a focused set of points, building straightforward sentences, providing specific information, making revisions, and recognizing factors that are conducive to good writing. Stresses the importance of improving writing skills through practice and includes a worksheet for…

States that, for one instructor, professional inquiry in a graduate education program has led to a critical examination of day-to-day practice in the classroom, especially regarding the writing process in the grade 7-9 writing workshop he formerly taught. (PA)

Presents: (1) the 1997-1998 Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List of 20 children's books; (2) the Texas Lonestar Reading List 1997-1998 of 20 children's books; and (3) essays by three Texas authors (Sherry Garland, G. Clifton Wisler, and Ida Luttrell) about why and what they write. (SR)

Review of research on students' use of word processing for text generation and revision and its impact on text quality suggests that enthusiasm about its benefits may be misplaced. Enabling students to model structural features of sophisticated texts may help with complex writing tasks and change conceptions of writing. (SK)

Examines the work of Janet Emig, particularly "The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders," as a means of gaining historical insight into the process movement in writing today. (TB)

Explores ways basic writers theorize identities that locate them in the larger culture. States that as part of the composing process students need to locate their own notions of the writer in a dominant culture that has labeled them "at risk." Studies student texts for "theories" about writing and identity; moves to construct…

Describes the importance of annotation to reading and writing practices and reviews new technologies that complicate the ways annotation can be used to support and enhance traditional reading, writing, and collaboration processes. Emphasizes issues and methods that will be productive for enhancing theories of workplace and classroom communication…

Proposes ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach for resolving the structure-agency binary and for treating the activities of writers in organizations as simultaneously embedded in and constitutive of organizational context. Illustrates the value of ethnomethodology with data from a study examining the social practices that surrounded the…

Discusses insights the author has gained from various experiences of writing. Brings these insights all together in a way that may point writing curriculum in a new and totally unexpected direction. Contends that the goal of writing curriculum is to have children writing competently, correctly, and effectively. Explains how to make writing matter…

Considers how Bobbie Ann Mason's short story "Shiloh" contains a wealth of metaphoric imagery and has been analyzed through various lenses of the literary tradition, including that of the Grail quest. Suggests that it provides the necessary components for any unit concentrating on teaching the anatomy of the elements of the short story. Discusses…

Describes how students parallel the process of author Megan McDonald in conducting research and collecting information to provide ideas for the form and content of their writing. Notes that guiding students to record and organize information in a graphic format helps them to transfer those interesting details to new types of writing. (SG)

Explores the creation of "An Extraordinary Life: The Story of a Monarch Butterfly." Selects this book because of the unprecedented decision to give the 1998 Orbis Pictus Award to both the author and the illustrator for a work in which text and illustration melded together. Develops an event model, revealing the creation of this…

Proposes a model which connects the acts of reading and writing in three cyclical components: the forming cycle, the coding cycle, and the reviewing cycle. Explains in each interlock of the cycles are the subprocesses generating, organizing, and editing. Notes that the sensor is centered where all three prime processes overlap, serving to…

Suggests the need to integrate drama into any future unified theory of the writing and reading process as symbolic action. Argues for the use of drama as an analogy for re-thinking pedagogy, because drama provides a mode of thinking that emphasizes the interplay of agent and structure. (RS)

This article describes a process-oriented writing program for use with learning-disabled students at all grade levels. Strategies for helping students at the planning stage, the drafting stage, and the evaluation and revision stage are offered. (DB)