The standardization of writing styles and formats and the use of jargon in the social sciences have had considerable consequences on the quality of academic work. Due to the emphasis on method, theory, and empirical rigor, creativity, personal narrative, and storytelling no longer play a large role in academic writing. Addressing the growing…

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of…

This article, based on Andrea Walsh's teaching experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), focuses on a strategy to inspire students to approach the revision process proactively with imagination and critical insight: envisioning essays as documentary films. It first looks at some central tasks of revision and then explores the…

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different language skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, to retrieve information from multiple sources, and compose an essay for a specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute to successful…

While research demonstrates the important role parents play in facilitating children's literacy development, little is known about the knowledge that underpins these exchanges. Here, we examined the association between parents' reading-related knowledge (phonological awareness, knowledge of syllable patterns, and identification of regular and…

This study examined the effectiveness of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) to improve students' ability to write expository essays after reading social studies text. Third-grade general education teachers (N = 14) were randomly assigned by clusters to SRSD or a business as usual control condition. One hundred and eighty consented students…

When students write informational text, they have the opportunity to engage with meaningful topics, become curious about the world, learn domain-specific knowledge, and use academic vocabulary. Given the possibilities for learning through writing informational text, it is important for teachers to reflect on and improve their informational writing…

In this paper, we demonstrate the relationship between reading and writing for pleasure. Children read a wide range of media as well as books for pleasure and develop strong affective bonds with the artefacts of literacy they encounter. What remains less well understood is the relationship between the array of texts children engage with and the…

Developmental psychologists are increasingly writing articles, columns, books, and blogs for the general public, but this type of writing can be challenging. Here, I provide guidance on how to communicate scientific ideas to nonscientists, touching on what content to cover, how to organize that content, what language to use, and what tone to…

Working within the framework of language learner strategies, and more specifically strategies employed by L2 writers, this article presents findings from a qualitative, longitudinal study of seven international college students in the United States. On the basis of data comprising 54 interviews with the students over a period of four years, and…

This empirical study serves two purposes. The first purpose is to validate a newly developed instrument, the Metacognitive Academic Writing Strategies Questionnaire (MAWSQ), which represents the multifaceted structure of metacognition in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing setting. The second purpose is to delineate the…

Seeking to support graduate student writers, writing centers at research universities have developed highly successful dissertation camps over the past 15 years. Previous research from North American dissertation camps has demonstrated significant benefits from these camps, as dissertation writers developed new writing habits and increased their…

Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) involves teaching cognitive writing strategies and apprenticing novices within collaborative writing communities. It is responsive to deaf students' diverse language experiences through embedded metalinguistic/linguistic components. A randomized controlled trial of SIWI was conducted with 15…

This literature review aims to provide a high-level overview of what is known about writing and writing instruction. While much is known, there is still so much more to learn, particularly in the Australian context. Compared to the reading literature, the writing literature is modest, and the quality of the research varies from study to study.…

Pluriliterate academic practices offer students who are literate in both their L1 and English the possibility of relying on sources in multiple languages. Surprisingly, there is little research on the factors playing a role in students' choice of sources and whether this choice is related solely or partly to the language of the source. This study…