Notes that the most pressing question occupying scholars in rhetoric and composition involves defining the relationship between the writing classroom and public discourse. Claims I. Young's notion of the ideal city, developed in her 1990 book "Justice and the Politics of Difference," can serve as a model to help theorize the connections…

Explores the intersection of poet William Stafford, the poet in each child, and poetry. Discusses influences of Stafford on the author during her academic training and subsequent academic career. Notes Stafford left behind a vision of the world, a way of thinking about the process of writing, and a respect for the writer that is each child as…

Asks seven successful poets to share their knowledge and experience of writing poetry by answering seven questions that provide classroom teachers with approaches for facilitating students' poetry writing. Addresses topic selection, writing processes, language usage, choosing a form, whether forms should be taught, revision, and whether hard work…

Katherine Keil, a high school English teacher, has developed an approach that goes beyond simply teaching poetry to creating classrooms that celebrate poetry in order to overcome the fear of poetry in students and the teacher. She encourages students to play with language, publishes student's work to a web site and models the writing process…

The challenges faced by the teachers while teaching the writing process to their students are discussed. It is every teacher's job to assist in making professional development attainable and sustainable for which they should always revise himself or herself in order to meet the needs of the students under their care.

In this study, we examined why observational learning positively affects learning outcomes of new writing tasks. In this study, we focused on the effects of observational learning on the temporal organization (i.e., orchestration) of writing processes and on the subsequent influence on text quality. An experiment was set up in which participants…

By the time they reach preschool or kindergarten, young children are already writers. They don't have much experience, but they're filled with stories to tell and ideas to express--they want to show the world what they know and see. All they need is a nurturing teacher to recognize the writer at work within them. Taking an exciting, new approach…

In order to examine how large-scale testing affects writing pedagogy and students' composition processes, the author conducted a study that centered on two high school senior English classes in the state of Kentucky. Since 1991, Kentucky has implemented a large-scale writing assessment and system of teacher and school accountability. Generating…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

Students entering teacher preparation programs often exhibit a desire to be shown the magic bullet of teaching practice. When they fail to be presented with recipes for success, or when the instruction they receive in methods classes does not match their own understanding of instructional methods and what they believe methods should be, they can…

Writing, and the vocabulary building that goes with it, is a more complex process than merely putting words on a page. In the process of acquiring vocabulary, for example, students need to understand not just what individual words mean but also which combinations of these words in sentences or paragraphs convey a meaningful message to the reader…

Writing researchers have developed various methods for investigating the writing process since the 1970s. The early 1980s saw the occurrence of the real-time computer-aided study of the writing process that relies on the protocols generated by recording the computer screen activities as writers compose using the word processor. This article…

Chinese brush calligraphy is a valuable civilization legacy and a high art of scholarship. It is still popular in Chinese banners, newspaper mastheads, university names, and celebration gifts. There are Web sites that try to help people enjoy and learn Chinese calligraphy. However, there lacks advanced services such as content-based retrieval or…

This concise guide to writing is designed to help any academic become not only productive but truly prolific. It is a pithy, no-nonsense, no-excuses guide to maximizing the quality and quantity of scholarly output. The authors offer an accessible overview of the art of writing efficiently and effectively, provide a one-stop source for the nuts and…

In this article, the author discusses how her sixth-grade students gained writing skills and learned to "dream big dreams." She wanted to celebrate literacy, and also create something that could raise funds to support literacy projects, so she challenged her students to write to their favorite authors and ask each for a recipe. The end result of…