The first time of many significant encounters is the most intense, raising awkwardness, anxiety and hope. This article presents data from doctoral students (n = 80) who described the first time that they submitted writing to their supervisor and received feedback. The first writing/feedback exchange is an initiation into the cultures of academia.…

This paper reviews research on outcomes of writing programs for students in grades 2 to 12. Studies had to meet rigorous standards of research including use of randomized or well-matched control groups, measures independent of the program developers, researchers, and teachers, and adequate sample size and duration. Fourteen studies of 12 programs…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

Teaching a senior seminar on creative nonfiction led author Sarah Gompers to consider how she might help her students understand the concept of writing with vulnerability. All stages of the writing process must be explicitly taught, and this extends to something as basic as topic selection. When students are taught about vulnerability--what it is,…

Technical writing skills are vital to professional engineers, but many engineering students find them difficult to master. This paper presents a case study carried out among ~300 first and second year engineering students who had little previous experience in technical writing. The aim was to support them to write better technical reports.…

Argumentative writing has long been considered an essential skill for disciplinary learning. For researchers and curriculum developers to develop ecologically valid instructional approaches to argumentative writing, a pivotal prerequisite is the understanding of how teachers use various instructional methods in tandem to teach different…

I teach the beginning level English as a Second Language classes at the Don Bosco School for Adults in Kansas City, Missouri. We service refugees and immigrants from all over the world. In the beginning level classroom, many refugee students require guidance and instruction when they use writing utensils. They do not know how to draw basic shapes,…

Looking back on the ways writing studies has developed as a discipline in the 25 years since he guest edited an issue of The Clearing House, Pemberton discusses how the "social constructionist" movement in writing research has evolved and expanded over time. He focuses on three aspects of that evolution: (1) understanding writing as a…

This study examines the beliefs and practices, specific to writing, of six preschool teachers using observations, interviews, photographs, and surveys. Gerde, Bingham, and Pendergast's (2015) WRITE [Writing Resources and Interactions in Teaching Environments] protocol was used during observations, allowing researchers to focus on each classroom's…

In this "Voices from the Field" article, we (two teacher-educators/-researchers) describe our negotiation of teaching practices in an online writing course for pre-service teachers. Our overarching purpose is to disrupt dominant discourses of writing and to illuminate critical perspectives. Specifically, we highlight intentional shifts…

Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this…

Despite the importance of preparing students to write successfully in their academic and professional careers, instructors often struggle to sustain student focus on the complex and demanding nature of the writing process. In response, we conducted a pilot project at a university located in urban Los Angeles using a wiki-enhanced and blended…

Institutions of higher education introduced professional writing classes as a way of preparing students for on-the-job-writing. To better accomplish the goal as well as to get a more consistent output from these classes that require the writing of a project proposal or report, writing teachers may want to incorporate "R.E.A.L."…

Research suggests that students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) struggle to develop writing skills. Paragraph text writing is a component of written expression and refers to the composition of connected text into multiple, related sentences of appropriate semantics, spelling, syntax, and usage (e.g., capitalization and…

In the later years of undergraduate study, students read, process, and evaluate primary literature within specific fields of study. Shifting from textbooks to the vast amounts of peer-reviewed current literature can be difficult for students. This article details an innovative approach to helping students successfully make this transition through…