Mutuality practice in the composition classroom attempts to create equal subject positions between teachers and students, mitigating the effects of dominant power structures inherent to an authority-driven classroom while showing teachers that their students are fully capable, though fledgling, members of an academic community. Understanding how…

In this era of high-stakes testing and densely packed state standards, it is too easy for writing to become a meaningless process, useful only for school. Many strategies can help to get all students writing, but this author set out to find a strategy to help students see the power of writing and to know that their voices matter. Writing groups…

This first written assignment of the semester for the author's undergraduate introductory art history class--an essay where students describe and reflect upon the significance of a family heirloom--is instrumental in meeting class objectives. The author's objectives in this class are for students: (1) to broaden their conception of what art is…

Writing allows students to clarify their thinking. Through the process of writing, students recognize what they know and what they still need to learn. This article describes how a middle school mathematics teacher and language arts teacher worked with a secondary content area literacy professor during a specific writing assignment. The "How-to"…

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the…

Introduction: Past research on source-based writing assignments has hesitated to scrutinize how students actually use information afforded by sources. This paper introduces a method for the analysis of text transformations from sources to texts composed. The method is aimed to serve scholars in building a more detailed understanding of how…

The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

Place-based writing affords students an opportunity to write meaningfully about themselves, grounded in a place that they know. Place-based writing is versatile and can be additive--taking just a week or two within a semester of different projects--or transformative, if positioned as the theme for an entire course. If students can learn to write…

Using Lautmatti's (1978) framework, this study examines the types of topic progression techniques used in 120 paragraphs written by 40 Iranian undergraduate students. Each student was asked to write three types of paragraphs; namely, those of comparison and contrast, cause-effect, and chronology. The present study investigates the relationship…

This article describes Pop in a Popper, an effective lesson for teaching students how to choose and use words to give their writing fluency and flair. Pop in a Popper introduces the appositive: a group of words inserted after a noun to modify that noun. In simplest terms, writers pop this group of words into a sentence to tell more about a noun.…

How might middle school teachers and schools more appropriately engage early adolescent students in the writing process so that they are motivated and engaged to "want" to write and write well? This article introduces "Writers Matter," an approach designed to engage and motivate young adolescents in the writing process,…

In this study, I present an analysis of instructor comments on assignments written for upper-division courses in the biological sciences as a window into current practices around teaching science writing to major students. My results demonstrate that, while the overwhelming majority of instructors respond primarily to lower order issues of grammar…

Promoting blog content is a social activity--a means of communicating one student's appreciation of another student's work. This article explores the feasibility of using student promotions of content, in a blogosphere, to identify quality content, and implications for students and instructors. We show that students actively and voluntarily…

Though separated by geographical distance, a student with disabilities, his advisor, and his writing coach consorted in the Cloud using Google applications to achieve a writing goal. Our scenario demonstrates how emerging technologies can bridge transactional distance and "virtually" supplant face-to-face conferencing around a college…

This quasi-experimental study examined effects of a 12-week, teacher-delivered, morphologically focused intervention on writing outcomes for fifth-grade U.S. students. In order to help students gain control over the morphologically complex words that typify academic writing, the intervention called students' attention to the morphological…