Metaphor-making is a universal human endeavor that manifests across cultures in various ways. Analyzing metaphors enables educators to gain a greater understanding of many social and cultural issues. Teaching children to write through metaphor based upon their emotional landscapes can reveal much of their inner worlds. Such texts can have a…

Teachers of composition are modernists because the teaching of composition has been, and continues to be, a modernist enterprise in American colleges and universities. The question explored in this paper is, why? Why do practitioners of composition remain mired in the modern? Since the 1980s writing teachers have had a sense as a profession that…

"Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." tells of King's childhood determination to use "big words" through biographical information and quotations. In this lesson, students in grades 3 to 5 explore information on Dr. King to think about his "big" words, then they write about their own…

In the last few years, the focus has evolved from considering an "ethic of research" in composition studies to an "ethic of representation" in person-based research. One of the dominant questions that emerged from this shift is how researchers represent their students and their writings in composition research. What does the…

Following the lead of James Berlin, the trend in rhetoric and composition for the past two decades has been to develop pedagogies that not only affirm the social construction of knowledge, but also interrogate the ideological structures of power in which students are always and already embedded. Since Berlin and others of the "political…

The Holocaust is a powerful topic for writing classrooms because it elicits strong emotions from most students at the same time that it is remote enough to keep from overwhelming them (at least at first). At the same time the topic presents a minefield for the unwary or naive writing instructor--it is important, for example, to emphasize the…

A highly structured six-step strategy to teach paragraph organization skills to learning disabled secondary students revealed that the students, who were beginning rather than remedial writers, could profit from a formula writing approach that focused on one writing component at a time with maximum practice. (CL)

Outlines a procedure for teaching business writing students to write concise and accurate survey questionnaires. (AEA)

Discusses a structure for the problem solving paper. Provides several sample outlines of a hypothetical problem and solution. (HTH)

Recounts a literature instructor's successful entry into teaching technical writing. (HTH)

Procedures are outlined for teaching writing as a step-by-step process. (MJL)

With regard to the preceding articles in this issue, Joseph F. Dominic identifies key ideas of the research on writing, Susan Florio-Ruane points out similarities and differences among the articles, and Nancy L. Stein discusses methodological and conceptual issues in writing research. (RH)

Describes writing exercises in which students transform a simple text into their own original, more complex production. (EKN)

Presents a professional writer and writing teacher's ideas on writing and the writing process. (JL)

Presents an interview with an author who has written many children's books, covering her life and opinions on writing, writing for children, and teaching writing. (JL)