The act of writing presents difficulties for 10-30% of elementary school children. This study's objectives were to compare the abilities of digitizer-based evaluation of the handwriting process and conventional evaluation of the handwriting product to discriminate between children with proficient and dysgraphic handwriting. Copied and dictated…

This study addressed two questions related to the writing of second graders ("n"=195). The first examined the effects of writing prompts on the compositional fluency of second-grade students. The second considered whether these effects are different based on spelling achievement and handwriting fluency. Students wrote six narratives in response to…

Computer technology has become an indispensable tool in writing. Those of us who have spent any time in schools can attest to the prevalence of word processing, concept mapping, Web editing, and electronic presentation software, all deployed, to a large extent, in the collective effort to enhance student writing. The degree to which such tools…

This article describes the difficulties and hopes that the author, a compositionist in the English Department at Miami University, perceived in his attempts to establish a collaborative arrangement with the writing center at the regional campus where he works. (Contains 4 notes).

This narrative provides an account of one teacher's use of a minimal, real-world text--a Fantale lollie wrapper--in her classroom as a means of motivating Year 7 students to write concisely and imaginatively. It discusses the success of this strategy and the way in which information technology was utilised in the production of facsimile texts.…

Finding voice is often the most intimidating stumbling block to authentic writing in the classroom. Linda Rief offers insight into tapping students' passion and promoting personal responsibility for learning with her "quickwrites," and includes a checklist of ways to elicit writing that matters.

Teachers must also be writers. This notion, at the very heart of the National Writing Project, led Judith Jester to recognize the power of process, feedback, audience, modeling, and thinking. Being a writer and sharing the successful strategies she learned as a NWP fellow has helped her students grow as both thinkers and writers.

We are presently witnessing a renewed interest in the aesthetics of philosopher and educator John Dewey. And it would seem that this interest marks a significant intellectual reorientation and not simply a passing fad. The publications Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, The Journal of…

An effective mode of reflective practice and reflexivity is through personal professional narrative and story exploration. All professional and personal experience is naturally storied; telling or writing stories are prime human ways of understanding, communicating and remembering. Narratives of vital or key areas of professional experience can be…

In this article, the authors describe an innovative composition pedagogy they collaborated called "Showdown in Superior!". In order to simulate a current public controversy over a proposed mine in Superior, Arizona, three writing classes assumed roles as competing interests and composed researched and reasoned arguments that supported…

Graduate programs in business emphasize technical analysis in finance, accounting, marketing, and other core courses. Important business decisions--what market to target, which products to offer, how to finance an acquisition, whether to lease or buy equipment--require mathematical and statistical problem solving. Management communication courses…

In order for students to write like authors they need to read like writers. This requires direct instruction in attending to the writing craft through the use of quality adolescent literature and engagement in reading and writing. This article focuses on writing catchy introductions. The author offers the lesson objective and a teacher script…

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not…

Against the backdrop of the passionate and conflicting assessments of Jacques Derrida that followed his 2004 death, this article reviews rhetoric and composition's scholarly appropriation of deconstruction during the 1980s and early 1990s. Contending that the field primarily used deconstruction in the service of refutation, this article positions…

Many students struggle to analyze literature and fall into writing plot summaries. They fail to engage with the text because analyzing literature is a foreign concept for so many of them. In this article, the author discusses how she came up with a method to help students adapt to college writing and thinking. Building from a technique that…