This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the "craft" of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers's "(Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies": process, genre, author, and…

For many writing teachers, helping students discover, explore, refine and, most importantly, inhabit their "voices" is both the teachers' greatest challenge and pleasure. Voice, they tell them, is what their writing "sounds" like when someone reads it; it is their personality on the page; it is the writer "speaking" to the reader. But what happens…

In his foundational work, "English Composition and Rhetoric," Alexander Bain set forth the framework for what students and teachers now routinely refer to as the five-paragraph essay. Teachers were so inculcated with Bain's paradigm for the "perfect" essay format, they in turn have inculcated their students, and they just say now, "Write an…

This handbook presents a wide range of research on adults who have low literacy skills. It looks at the cognitive, affective, and motivational factors underlying adult literacy; adult literacy in different countries; and the educational approaches being taken to help improve adults' literacy skills. It includes not only adults enrolled in adult…

The Young Writers Program (YWP) is the latest writing workshop to be developed for the classroom. It challenges students to choose a topic and write a novel-length piece based on that topic, without worrying about spelling or grammar. While the foundation of this philosophy is solid, the support and structure of the Young Writers Program website…

A multiple baseline alternating treatment (A-B-C-D) design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a writing and peer revision intervention. Eight middle school students enrolled in an alternative program for students with emotional and behavioral disorders received Self- Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) for 10-minute quick writing and…

Dynamic assessment is a procedure in which development is simultaneously assessed and improved with regard to the individual's or group's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD; Lantolf & Poehner, 2004). This study aimed to follow dynamic assessment and investigate the impact of three types of implicit and explicit feedback on the essay writing of…

Language transfer theory elucidates how first language (L1) knowledge and grammatical features are applied in second language (L2) writing. Deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) students who use or are developing American Sign Language (ASL) as their L1 may demonstrate the use of ASL linguistic features in their writing of English. In this study, we…

Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic…

This article outlines a rational for responsive, differentiated writing instruction that targets students' identified needs with respect to various dimensions of the writing process. Discussed is a cycle that requires ongoing assessment, instructional decision-making, responsive, differentiated instruction, guided practice, and assessment.…

To examine the importance of manual character writing to reading in a new writing system, 48 adult Chinese-as-a-foreign-language students were taught characters in either a character writing-to-read or an alphabet typing-to-read condition, and engaged in corresponding handwriting or typing training for five consecutive days. Prior knowledge of…

Problem statement: Writing an essay is a most difficult creative work and consequently requires detailed instruction. There are in fact two types of instruction that contribute to the development of writing skills: Reading activities analysing texts in content and schematic structure to find out how they are composed and process writing…

Writing is a foundational skill that can support and extend student learning across the curriculum. Writing is used to communicate stories, opinions, and information, and to express one's understanding of concepts and ideas during an individual's K-12 educational career and well beyond. Despite written expression's importance and…

We reflect on how to implement the instrumental aspect of collaborative writing in such a way that the developmental aspect of collaborative writing is maximally fostered, based on conditions necessary for socially constructed learning. We discuss four instrumental strategies that bolster mutual ownership of the writing and protect the social…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop and test a strategy to support middle grade students' persuasive writing skills. The sample included 52 eighth-grade students who were either proficient or struggling writers. The students were randomly assigned to either receive training on a graphic organizer designed to scaffold effective…