Much research has been done in the area of storytelling with young children. Storytelling, as the author speaks of it, means a specific time set aside for the oral composing of texts. For the tellers, it is a chance to think through, discover, plan, and develop the story that they may, eventually, decide to write, alongside a supportive teacher…

Hip-hop as content in a first-year writing course offers students a powerful way to connect with their worlds. This article draws on Marcel Proust as a kind of rhyme to legitimate hip-hop as a substantive expressive medium to achieve artistry in writing.

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…

The National Writing Project (NWP) is the nation's premier professional development network dedicated to improving the teaching of writing. The NWP network comprises nearly 200 local sites in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. This report presents the results of a seven-year survey study of teachers participating in NWP summer…

Recent cases have demonstrated that plagiarism is a hot-button issue. It is also pervasive, occurring in universities, four-year colleges, community colleges, secondary schools, graduate programs, international classrooms, multicultural classrooms, writing centers, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, scholarly publications and the popular…

In response to widespread concern that many American students do not write well enough to meet the requirements of higher education and the workplace, the College Board's National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges has called for a writing revolution. A key component of this revolution is evaluation, with particular emphasis…

Although academic writing in higher education has been the focus of research efforts for more than two decades, the specific writing experiences, needs and difficulties of undergraduate nursing and midwifery students have remained largely under-researched. This article reports on a project that investigated the nature and dynamics of academic…

Research articles (RAs) have been recognized as a distinct genre in the English-using discourse community because of their unique writing conventions. Despite the great number of studies on the analysis of the textual or phrasal aspects of abstracts of RAs, few have been transformed into actual teaching materials for EFL graduate students. The…

In North American university contexts, the language diversity found in English mainstream composition ("L1") classrooms resembles more and more that found in ESL ("L2") writing classrooms. As these two groups become less differentiated, those specifically trained in L2 writing might well wonder whether the needs of the…

This paper reports on a study on the relationship between cognitive task complexity and linguistic performance in L2 writing. In the study, two models proposed to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance in L2 are tested and compared: Skehan and Foster's Limited Attentional Capacity Model (Skehan, 1998; Skehan…

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…

Having established the "Writing Lab" at James Madison University in 1974, the author has watched the evolution and proliferation of Writing Centers in colleges and universities over the past 32 years. Common to support services at the beginning of her career as a writing specialist and in the present Writing Center are two primary areas…

One ingredient that may serve as a catalyst for writing development is changes in writing knowledge. This study assessed the veracity of two tenets underlying this proposal: that skilled writers are more knowledgeable than less skilled writers, and that individual differences in knowledge are related to writing performance. Both of these…

In this article, the author talks about Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones." Over the past 20 years, she has referred to its pages whenever she needs a chapter of cheery Buddhist philosophy to soften an onslaught of editorial rejection slips. In the midst of any heady publishing success, she turns to the book to remind her that,…

A case study on the teaching of writing, this paper discusses what motivates students in a freshman writing course to complete increasingly difficult writing assignments. The study provides a glimpse into how one class of freshman students developed positive expectations for writing a paper about a difficult poem by helping each other map…