Every writing program contains implicit information on the amount of writing that should be assigned, how the essays should be evaluated, the type of grammar--if any--students should study, and the type of composition instruction that will be most effective. Research has not identified an optimal level of writing frequency, and although frequent…

Logical strategies used in informative writing include factuality, comprehensiveness, and surprise value, which provides the focus of the paper and guides both the organization and the thoroughness with which each subtopic must be covered. Failure to teach surprise value is the main problem behind the uninteresting reports that teachers must face…

Competing views of written texts, of the process of writing, and of the purposes of the scholarly investigation of written discourse appear inherently at odds. Today composition theory is often demeaned as being only pedagogical while literary study is granted the status of a self-fulfilling academic pursuit. What is needed is a model or matrix…

As part of a larger research study, three freshman writers were observed in order to determine when they rewrote compositions, when they rethought major concepts and designs, and when they reviewed stylistic options and made purposive as opposed to uninformed changes in their writing. Their tape recorded comments were guided by questions on (1)…

The 24 entries in this annotated bibliography are designed to introduce teachers and researchers to the major studies in the field of neurology as it relates to the composing process. Entries in the first section are of works that explain the complex processes and physiology of the brain, while those in the second section are of works attempting…

A synthesis of three different writing theories into one model for the writing process is given in this report and evidence is provided for various parts of the model from studies using different methods of investigation. The model developed contains three phases: (1) processing or whiting as discovery, including propositionalizing, subchunking,…

During writing conferences, many teachers impose their own ideas and attitudes on the student's essay, and often are not sure how else to help their students arrive at changes that will improve their writing. Understanding or assessment of a student's prior knowledge about the topic can be very helpful to a teacher in shaping the conference and…

To determine whether teacher intervention or treatment (the introduction of literary devices used by published writers) during the process of writing would lead to greater incidence and improved use of creative devices in gifted children's writing, ten talented students from the ages of six to eleven were selected to meet with the researcher twice…

The King Construct Scale, which measures student attitudes about writing, contains 25 bipolar constructs which reflect four major areas of the writing process: purpose of the writing, source of the writing, audience the writing is for, and mode the writing takes. The scale was developed by collecting the data with Pianko and Rogers'"P & R…

Virtually all composition research has been done about teaching methodology; little research about the theory of the process of composition has been done. A 1964 study, the first on the composition process, used as an operational definition the concept of the composing process as being a series: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. This linear…

Theory and practice, especially in education and more particularly about the composition process, stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, otherwise practice gets gimmicky and theory becomes dogmatic. The role of theory is to define purposes, figure out why something works so it can be repeated, give perspective, and free teachers from…

A brief overview of the history of teaching writing reveals a shift from an emphasis on the composed product to the composing process and provides writing teachers who work one-to-one with students with a theoretical seven-stage model of the composing process: starting-point, exploration, incubation, illumination, composing, reformulation, and…

David Bleich's work in reader response and James Britton's composition research provide a theoretical justification for the use of composition in the literature class and for the use of literature in the writing class. Britton has found that talking about writing is valuable since talk is more expressive than writing. In the literature class…

Fourth grade students' miscues occurring in signaled sentence combining exercises were compared with their reading miscues in a study relating cognitive style to miscue analysis of reading and writing. The records of 16 students were used, with reflective students and impulsive students so designated on the basis of their miscues per one-hundred…

Most people are taught writing as a product rather than as a process. Whether the process is prewriting, writing, and postwriting; or planning, writing, and revising, teachers must be concerned with helping students discover and develop the process that works best for them. Thus it is the writing teacher's responsibility to teach students how to…