An exploratory study examined the relationship between adolescents' stance ("monologic" versus "dialogic") and several issues, including the degree to which adolescents explore tensions and contradictions in their writing and the nature of such tensions as related to gender and/or school attitudes. For the purposes of the…

The composing processes of four freshmen writers of varying proficiency who had been taught problem-solving strategies for one semester were traced to see whether they would differ in how they set up and followed through with strategic options. Each of the four students produced a think-aloud protocol as he or she planned and wrote an assignment…

Much composition research, even qualitative research, posits a world "out there" waiting to be understood and seeks causes of phenomena without considering the subjective states of researchers or study participants. Because of this, many researchers consider social phenomena as "things" which coerce human behavior. But even…

A study at Lansing, Michigan Community College investigated whether the current policy of grading the students according to the number of errors in their compositions was actually helping the students to make fewer errors in their writing. Error data were collected from 4 graded essays from each of 311 students in 2 writing courses (one on…

In order to evaluate writer control of global coherence under various contexts, writer texts produced by 13 college freshmen enrolled in a basic skills section of a composition course were collected as a natural part of the ongoing instruction. The texts examined were written on five different topics: misuse of power, a personal experience of the…

The Primary Trait System (PTS) of scoring was devised by the National Assessment of Educational Progress to score large numbers of natural writing samples. Essentially, PTS permits evaluation of writing in an objective way, but one that does not rely on scoring surface features such as mechanics, grammar, or spelling. While the assessment value of…

To determine the relationship between handwriting speed and syntactic complexity, a study examined the syntactic features of 60 students enrolled in either a basic writing course or a traditional college composition course. Fast and slow handwriting were identified from highest scores on any one of four writing "tests." The writing…

Six scientific essayists were interviewed to gain some understanding of their writing processes. The writers were Roger Sawin, who writes for "Horticulture"; Harold Morowitz who writes for "Hospital Practices,""Science 82" and "Science 83"; Stephen Jay Gould who writes for "Natural History"; Jeremy…

This book discusses and evaluates the implications of the theory of deconstruction for composition and pedagogy. The book analyzes the emerging field of composition studies within the epistemological and ontological debate over writing precipitated by Plato (who would abandon writing entirely) and continued by Jacques Derrida, who argues that all…

Reading and writing are part of the world of children. Most school language arts programs, however, do not help students develop a personal, functional need for being language users themselves. Too often in schools, the purpose of language is to satisfy an external demand and not an internal, expressive, or communicative need. Research in the last…

An experimental study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshmen before and after instruction to determine whether direct instruction in F. Christensen's "Generative Rhetoric of a Sentence" (1967) made a significant impact on freshmen writers' use of right-branched free modification. The study used a quantitative,…

Concern that computers in the classroom might alienate learners and depersonalize learning raises questions about the impact of computers on writing instruction. A study examined relationships in one school's computer writing lab among instructor, student tutors, and students through what was called the "computer lab matrix of…

Proponents of writing across the curriculum are quick to clarify that writing to learn is not the same as learning to write; but as flip sides of a single coin, the two support one another. Across-the-curriculum writing finds its merit in removing students from their passivity. Cross-curricular writing activities fall into two groups--expressive…

This study investigated the performance of 28 journalism students in making structural and mechanical/stylistic editing changes in spot news stories on video display terminal (VDT) screens and in hard copy. Results showed that editing on the VDT screen resulted in more structural and fewer mechanical/stylistic changes; academically superior…

To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…