Although the recent thrust toward writing as interaction with a text has led to de-emphasis of personal-experience writing per se, autobiography, if approached in the context of textuality (in Roland Barthes's sense), can provide a model for writing as a means of discovering one's identity--of interacting with life as text and with the written…

In this paper William Stafford's varied descriptions and occasional judgments as to what it means to write a poem are gathered by prospecting through his essays, published lectures, and transcribed interviews. The paper describes Stafford's perspective on (1) the powerful language of poetry; (2) finding each poem's unique form; (3) practicing the…

With regard to proposal and report writing in particular, the Self-Monitoring Negative Checklist (SMNC) offers the potential of finished products that more completely realize the writer's objectives and serve the reader's or user's needs. Presented as a series of 31 warnings of what can go wrong in a proposal, the SMNC represents a mode of…

For teachers of speech-oriented basic writers, the choices of what to teach--and what to count as learning--ought to be guided by those requirements of academic culture that are indispensable for basic writers to know, specifically the use of written language, a discourse specialized in both form and function and differing substantially from…

"Stonehill Writes" is an example of an in-house Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC) journal that records what is being written and how it is being written by administrators, faculty, students, and alumni. Published at Stonehill College, a small liberal arts college with a student body of 1600 and a faculty of 107 full-time teachers, the…

The first of two volumes, this book is primarily concerned with the teaching of creative writing at any grade level, although some ideas may not be applicable in teaching very young students. Although concentrating on the writing of free verse poetry and short "expressive" prose, much of the material presented can be applied to any…

Intended for teachers, students, and for anyone who is dissatisfied with his or her understanding of writing, this book is focused on practical exercises and experiments. The first section of the book, "What Writing Is," consists of two chapters of primary interest to teachers, and provides a general orientation to the document's approach. The…

Because any reading or writing research project or teaching method rests on some kind of epistemological assumptions and some models of reading and writing processes, a coherent theoretical approach to the interrelationships of the reading and writing processes is needed. In light of the post-Einsteinian scientific paradigm and Peircean semiotics,…

In developing teaching strategies for students who are poor writers but good readers, it is useful to explore the characteristics of good readers and of poor writers, and to consider implications for improving classroom practices. Good readers tend to put into practice four major cognitive strategies when they read: they plan, translate or…

A study was conducted to test a model that conceives of long term memory as a propositional network of ideas made up of knowledge clusters and related subclusters. After two pilot studies suggested that recall order of ideas was unrelated to organization, the study investigated whether units of main and supporting ideas produced during…

Generating writing ideas is often a serious obstacle for students. Some classroom techniques to help them out of this dilemma include word associating and self-questioning. Students can also construct a matrix chart with the subheadings from their information resources. Once ideas are generated, they can be arranged in appropriate presentation…

A study investigated what fourth grade students understand about composing personal narrative discourse. Specifically, the study explored what the subjects understood about structuring personal narrative texts and about evaluating a narrated experience for an audience. Subjects were 13 fourth grade students, and the methodology consisted of…

Based on courses showing teachers how to use many kinds of objects to teach writing and stimulated by ideas from teachers across the country, this booklet contains suggestions for helping students improve their writing. The booklet discusses writing about objects as a process involving the following steps: making observations and gathering data,…

In a study exploring how writers use audience awareness and how that awareness is related to the writer's age, four eighteen-year-old and four nine-year-old writers were assigned letters to write for two different audiences: a friend and a great aunt whom they had never met. Thinking-aloud writing protocols were produced at the time of writing. At…

The current focus on high level planning and abstract goals runs the risk of misrepresenting the contributions that cognitive psychology could make to the study of writing if it neglects important linguistic features that distinguish the writing of natural language from other problem solving tasks. An alternative perspective on writing emphasizes…