A longitudinal study combined Stephen Tsuchdi's Workaday activities with Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives to bridge the WAC/WID (writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines) divide. The researchers hoped that by combining concrete activities that can be applied across disciplines with a Bloomian conceptual framework of…

At the University of Central Florida student portfolios have been required in the College of Education for many years. Student journals are reviewed and graded by faculty. All departments require students to submit portfolios before their senior teaching internship. The portfolios illustrate who the student is now and how he or she wants to be as…

A composition researcher collected stories from students with writing anxiety, using qualitative research tools of interview and interpretation. In literary theory it is not unusual to speak of anxiety of influence when referring to the torment of proving one is equal to a revered author. The critic Harold Bloom presented it as his theory of the…

This collection of essays, culled from presentations at the first Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition, examines the development of composition as a profession, focusing on the period between 1963 and 1983 when composition changed in a number of crucial ways. Essays in the collection are: (1) "Composition History and…

For an analysis of real-world writing, a researcher picked annual reports since they are written for stockholders, financial advisers, and "the competition." Annual reports are essentially "puff pieces," documents written by company people aiming to please the stockholders. Because of the varied audience, the narrative section,…

Literacy in the military has seen drastic changes since the World War II era and even the Vietnam era. Qualification tests are stricter and literacy programs are more available than before. Literacy in the military is crucial in a technological world. In today's armed forces, many soldiers concentrate on the technical aspect of combat through…

Identifies recent research findings in disciplines related to business communication, such as reading instruction, composition research, linguistics, and educational psychology. Analyzes subject matter of seven leading business communication texts. Suggests that business communication courses and textbooks incorporate the results of research from…

Analyzes the steps in the writing of an established poet and an 11-year-old boy. An appendix provides suggestions about how to encourage meaningful revision. (FL)

Describes classroom experiments, using invisible writing which produces a carbon copy while preventing scanning during the composing process, to examine how different writing tasks differ in their cognitive demands and how the need for scanning may indicate the cognitive difficulty of the task. (HTH)

Examines what college English teachers are thinking and doing in writing courses and programs. Indicates that the teaching of writing has not been greatly influenced by new research in writing and composition and offers suggestions for bridging the gap between theory and practice. (MM)

Suggests guidelines for evaluating and using the findings of research in the classroom. (JL)

Describes a longitudinal study of first-grade students' progress in learning punctuation. Examines the classroom as a writing environment, then presents a picture of the children's progress in learning to use apostrophes, quotation marks, and periods, drawing several implications for teaching. (HTH)

Stresses that both teachers' experiences in writing projects and the work of educational researchers support a "romantic" attitude toward writing in opposition to the back-to-basics and drill approaches. (JL)

Applies educational research on the composing process to the writing of junior high school students. Explains how tapes were used to create a new unit aimed at correcting student writing weaknesses. (JL)

Reports on the development of a home intervention strategy at the secondary school level to improve students' writing abilities. (HOD)