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…

Two competing paradigms seem to characterize all models of teaching behavior. The first may be labeled as behavior-analytic, detail specific, and structured in that the learner proceeds through prescribed steps toward each goal. The other may be described as inquiry-oriented and learner-centered in that the learner has greater choice of the means…

In a study of the revision strategies used by skilled and basic (unskilled) writers, 50 students assigned to an experimental group wrote an expository essay, then rewrote their compositions from memory. A control group of 20 students was given the same assignment, but the students were allowed access to their first drafts. As expected, the control…

This guide provides a rationale and suggests activities for teachers in all subject matter areas to use in helping their students to write. Some of the activities described are interdisciplinary in nature and lend themselves to team teaching arrangements; other activities are suggested that support the integration of writing into given content…

This paper specifies the content of composition instruction, some of which can be incorporated into material to be presented by and practiced on a computer. It describes instructional outcomes within the context of an instructional model of the composing situation and discusses them under the following headings: (1) the composing problem, (2)…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. The seven papers in this pamphlet were drawn from a seminar involving a small number of science teachers and cover a variety of topics,…