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,…

One of the most difficult problems facing researchers on writing is to define writing as a construct. The way writing is conceptualized determines how writing assignments are created and how written products are analyzed and rated. A functional approach to defining writing as a construct is presented here. It begins with the overall construct of…

Writers construct meaning when they compose texts, and readers construct meaning when they understand and interpret texts. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from…

Researchers and educators sometimes need to be reminded of the broad range of factors which have a crucial impact on how writers write. This paper offers a personal checklist of six factors which have been shown to be important, yet which are easy to forget in in heat of research because of the tendency to become immersed in a particular agenda…

The time has come to re-evaluate the metaphors used when people think about composition. Such a re-evaluation is under way and may affect composition theory, research models, and classroom practice well into the future. Robert Zoellner rejected the prevailing metaphor for teaching writing which equates the act of thinking with the act of writing.…

The process of writing is explored from three perspectives in this paper. In the first part of the paper writing is viewed as a communicative act with four principles that form tacit objectives in any communicative act: comprehensibility, enticingness, persuasiveness, and memorability. The second part of the paper, which examines writing in the…