Getting students to react to literature and write more than a good "topic" sentence is a perennial dilemma for teachers. A course at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont, that incorporated improvisation with the writing process used role playing to solve real life situations, physical and verbal warm-up exercises to…

In questionnaires given at the end of a freshmen writing course at the Utica College of Syracuse University, students characterized much of the writing they did for their portfolios as "fun" or "enjoyable." What they meant by this is not entirely clear, but it seems that since they chose what types of papers they would include…

An exploratory study examined the relationship between adolescents' stance ("monologic" versus "dialogic") and several issues, including the degree to which adolescents explore tensions and contradictions in their writing and the nature of such tensions as related to gender and/or school attitudes. For the purposes of the…

The composing processes of four freshmen writers of varying proficiency who had been taught problem-solving strategies for one semester were traced to see whether they would differ in how they set up and followed through with strategic options. Each of the four students produced a think-aloud protocol as he or she planned and wrote an assignment…

Students' writing can benefit not only from pedagogical strategies but also from imagistic thinking. Writing instructors should use images and metaphors to help students heighten their perception of themselves as organizers, to assist them in getting from one place to another within their material, and to offer analogies for the shape of the texts…

In order to evaluate writer control of global coherence under various contexts, writer texts produced by 13 college freshmen enrolled in a basic skills section of a composition course were collected as a natural part of the ongoing instruction. The texts examined were written on five different topics: misuse of power, a personal experience of the…

Designed to measure attitudes toward writing and changes in attitudes toward writing held by preservice and inservice teachers, this scale contains 50 statements representing three categories: preference for writing, perception of writing, and process of writing. Respondents circle one of five points ranging from "almost always" to…

Six scientific essayists were interviewed to gain some understanding of their writing processes. The writers were Roger Sawin, who writes for "Horticulture"; Harold Morowitz who writes for "Hospital Practices,""Science 82" and "Science 83"; Stephen Jay Gould who writes for "Natural History"; Jeremy…

Good writing involves a series of mental processes which go far beyond what is included in traditional writing instruction. Students are often evaluated on single writing samples written in short periods of time whereas good writing involves many revisions and much more time. Traditional instruction has emphasized the analytic processes of the…

Pedagogical approaches, which treat students as empty vessels into which knowledge is deposited, are inappropriate for teaching adults. Teachers of basic college composition courses should recognize the linguistic competence already possessed by adult students when teaching them about the processes involved in writing and helping them develop…

Reading and writing are part of the world of children. Most school language arts programs, however, do not help students develop a personal, functional need for being language users themselves. Too often in schools, the purpose of language is to satisfy an external demand and not an internal, expressive, or communicative need. Research in the last…

Composition instructors interested in fostering the development of their students' critical thinking skills can modify the thematic writing approach to that effect. Focusing an introductory composition course around one central theme, rather than on many, can offer students an explicit model of how knowledge, skills, and dispositions interact when…

To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…

To contribute intelligently to the scholarly debate in their field, students must realize that variations in vocabulary, stylistic conventions and methods of argumentation among different disciplines' literature reveal distinct assumptions about and methods for working within the world. The broad agreement between author and audience on the…

Aimed both at readers interested in cognition and/or writing and at instructional psychologists, this book explores the notion that various writing strategies involve different kinds of thinking, which ultimately affect the written product. The first part presents concepts central to the writing process, including two models of this process, an…