Generally, there are three kinds of software that could be used in college writing courses: word processing programs, interactive questionnaires, and text parsers. Although the benefits of these programs are well known, they still pose some problems. Word processors, for example, have been designed to "process" existing text; few have…

The focus of the conference proceedings in this booklet was evaluation of student writing at various levels and in various fields. The booklet contains a schedule of activities; a description of the morning session, which included a panel discussion on evaluating writing in college freshman composition courses; examples of students' papers, with…

In preparing students for business writing, a technical writing class should foster (1) a sensitivity to audience and an understanding of the business or technical organizational audience, (2) analytical problem solving that precedes any but the simplest writing task, (3) understanding of the patterns of organization that make information clear to…

Four twelfth-grade students of "distinct" personality types participated in a study of relationships between composing processes and use of cognitive strategies, of relationships between personality type and cognitive functioning, and of the effects of these interrelationships on composing. Personality profiles were drawn based on responses to the…

A college faculty workshop on developing a cross-disciplinary writing program is detailed in this paper. The goals of the workshop are defined as first helping content area teachers to learn to revise their syllabi, restructure their writing assignments, and teach content and disciplinary perspectives through writing, and then giving English…

According to researchers Herriott and Gross in their book "The Dynamics of Planned Educational Change," educational innovations fail because administrators (1) fail to diagnose problems correctly, (2) fail to anticipate and resolve implementation problems, (3) adopt an "ad hoc" approach to educational innovation, (4) accept…

Drawing upon reading and text comprehension theories and the sociolinguistic studies of M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, this paper builds theoretical links between the reading and writing processes. The major portion of the paper discusses the five language concepts that undergird both processes: (1) text processing in both reading and writing…

Prewriting involves the entire period of time (and necessary activities) which extends between knowing that one is going to write on something and knowing that one has found something specific and substantial to say about it. In classical rhetoric, prewriting is expressed by such terms as "inventio" (whereby the writer discovers ideas to…

Two major factors have shaped writing research from the cognitive processing viewpoint. The first factor contains the strategic decisions about the course of such research, suggesting what is interesting and how best to proceed. The decisions made in regard to writing as a cognitive process have been to focus on the act of writing, to seek a…

A review of descriptions of the composing process and of the analytical tools developed to measure, describe, and judge student writing suggests that a comprehensive theory of evaluation is an important next step for composition theorists and researchers who want to understand how people learn to write. A study involving three groups of…

The task of writing teachers is to convince the reluctant developmental writer to see writing not just in terms of grammatical correctness, but in terms of process or of discovery. Once the writer begins to see composition in this way, he or she may see that grammar is not irrelevant or arbitrary. By being taught the revision process, students can…

One of the most disconcerting findings of researchers who have looked at the way writers write is that their processes bear little resemblance to what is expected of students in the classroom. Some aspects of the lesson that do not correspond to our current understanding of the composing process are (1) providing no time for the conception and…

A committee of the National Council of Teachers of English collected data on the elementary composition teaching perspectives observed in literature between 1900 and 1950. The committee's report on two categories of their collected data--position statements and state-of-the art reviews--shows that English teachers have trended from emphasizing…

Empirical and theoretical research and a teacher's own writing experience provide equally valuable resources in the composition classroom. Current research on the composing process suggests a conceptual change from that of a rigid sequence of clearly demarcated stages to a more recursive, hierarchically structured model. Until recently, the role…

A series of 13 questions is offered for sequencing student writing activities according to a problem solving model of the composing process. The questions are organized in a cyclical framework for approaching any problem solving task that writing students may face. The questions fall into four progressively developed categories, including…