Empirical research on composing processes is virtually absent in our field. What "do" contemporary writers actually do when they compose? I argue that we need a return to research on composing processes, as writers are every day weaving together the social and cognitive through writing. One writer's composing process think-aloud suggests…

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…

A collaboration script is a set of instructions used to improve collaborative learning among students in technology-enhanced environments. Previously, university students' perspective has been under-represented in the study on collaboration scripts. In this article, we focus on understanding students' experiences in a scripted collaborative…

The authors detail how one fourth-grade teacher implemented a comics writers' workshop in the weeks that concluded the academic school year. Each phase of the comics writers' workshop is described. Students interpreted and analyzed the words, images, and design features that compose published comics before constructing and publishing their own…

This study investigated how computer agents' language style affects summary writing in an Intelligent Tutoring System, called CSAL AutoTutor. Participants interacted with two computer agents in one of three language styles: (1) a "formal" language style; (2) an "informal" language style; and (3) a "mixed" language…