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In this article, the author describes how journal writing can help ESL learners improve writing by examples and introduces different types of journals. Journal writing is a popular tool used in writing class to get students practice and provide students the method and space to explore their ideas and reflect on action, questions and experience they have had out of class. I am interested in limited-free writing and journal can be considered a good method of limited-free writing. The general topic will not limit students' thoughts, and journals can build the conversation with teacher outside of class by written language; in this sense, journals can help students develop critical thinking skills and practice English writing. Besides freewriting, there are more writing practices helpful for students.

This study addresses the levels of writing that are done in high school to prepare for college writing courses. This study assesses whether or not these activities of writing are adequate in prepping students for college. The questions asked are: What types of writing do high school teachers assign? Do high school teachers apply evidence-based writing practices? What adaptations do high school teachers make for struggling writers? What writing assessment practices do high school teachers apply? Are high school teachers prepared to teach writing? Do high school teachers believe that writing is important beyond high school? Do high school teachers believe students possess and will acquire needed writing skills?

Ardashir Vakil's "Teaching Creative Writing", to me, is an essential read. And I should add that I'm rarely excited by "Academic" writing. What makes Vakil's article different? Well other than his very cool name, he tackles the very real problem of teaching creativity with an opening salvo that had me hooked instantly. Paraphrasing Vakil's words in the first paragraph, you can't teach creativity. What he explores after qualifying his position is in and of itself a story. Vakil hopes to reveal his meaning by giving a kind of case study example of how he learned an important lesson in teaching. His attempt to impart that knowledge begins first though with another example, that of writer Anthony Trollope's attempts to turn his son into a great writer. In what read more like a conversation Vakil continues with an observation he's made of a trend in education, "…there has been a surge of interest in and enthusiasm for courses that offer creative writing, not to speak of books by writers and academics who profess to teach you how to write the perfect story or novel." (157). It's a trend I find myself following and since Vakil wrote this article in 2008 I wonder whether it has grown stronger in the last four years. The first whole paragraph of the second page boils down the troubles teachers face so well I wish I could quote the whole thing but I'll just point it out as an intensely insightful piece of the whole. As the piece continues Vakil describes what he did in his workshops and I must say I was envious of his students. As you follow Vakil's student through her journey to discover her writer's voice it is almost as though you are sitting across from Vakil while he tells the story, a quality of his writer's voice that burned brightly through this very academic material. I don't know that I'll say this many more times but this is a must read for anyone interested in teaching creative writing.

"profess to teach you how to write the perfect story or novel". Do you believe that creative writing is about teaching other to write a perfect story or novel? For me, i don't know. I'm not a writer, so i would assume so.

I ran across this article last year while browsing through journals in the library and thought it was humorous. I thought of it again when we read Bartholomae. In this article by Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer, the authors first set out to define what bullshit is, then discuss the ways in which bullshit is an aspect of academic rhetoric. The humorous (and most likely intended) irony is that all the while they are writing in a very traditional academic style which is, in and of itself, often associated with the very claims of bullshit they are examining. The main idea is that it matters not whether the content of the bullshit itself is true or false, but that bullshitters misrepresent themselves and their intentions (375). Eubanks and Schaeffer examine various types and purposes of bullshit, as well as various reasons one might engage in bullshitting, including representing a 'constructed self', gamesmanship, pleasure, reputation and superiority. "To sum up, prototypical bullshit has to do with a purposeful misrepresentation of self, has the quality of gamesmanship, and . . . is at least potentially a lie"(380). In the second half of the article, the authors examine academic writing, determining what features make it prototypical and how those features might be construed to be bullshit. One important aspect is the use of jargon, which seems to many non-academic readers to merely confuse for the purpose of elevating the author's status. "Often academic writers could be clearer but prefer to serve up something that sounds like bullshit" (382). They point out that students imitate this style in their own writing, and are rewarded for it. In addressing the issue of audience, the authors make a statement that is very reminiscent of Lave and Wenger's communities of practice in Situated Learning: "much academic publication, especially by young scholars, aims to qualify the author for membership in a group of specialists" (382). As we discu

This webpage is presented on the Texas A&M University website. It is all about low-stakes writing, and how it helps the students develop their ideas and write more freely. It beings with a description of low-stakes writing, and the ways in which a teacher would have this type of writing in their class (including how to grade, types of assignments, etc). The web page stresses the importance of feedback on the students' writing, and also says that the feedback can come from a number of sources, not just the teacher. It suggests responses from peers, the writing center, or the student themselves.

In the paragraph of "The path of multiple tools" the author introduced the idea of "the awesome juggling act" created by Mel Levine. Levine came up with this idea because he believes that the task of writing consist of constantly switching attention between multiple goals and subtasks. "The awesome juggling act" can be described as a boy who is juggling eight balls at the same time. The boy is keeping all the balls in the air at the same time ; to write you must keep all of the parts of writing in your memory while you write.

Andrea R. Olinger from the Department of Applied Linguistics at University of California, Los Angeles demonstrates "how interaction constructs discoursal identities" (273) in her article, "Constructing identities through: 'discourse': Stance and interaction in collaborative college writing." Olinger brings up an important point in this article, "that students often feel a mixture of desire for an resistance to the identities they must take on" (274). The examination of college students' writing demonstrated how these identities are "contested, desired, and resisted" (274). By now English 431 students should have seen some form of writing from their English 30 students. Thus, now we can ask ourselves as well as the English 30 students in what ways do the writer's discoursal identity resist or conform to the expectations of a college writing course? 

This post discusses how to write in your true voice, but online, not in academic writing. I thought it was interesting though, because it addresses avoiding "corporate speak" and suggests using first person to get a personal message across. In academic writing, I think "corporate speak" could actually be proper grammar and certain styles. Do they take our voice out of writing? It's not always an option to take out a style from writing. And in academic writing, it's rarely an option to use first person.

The article I found articulates the beneficial attributes of tutoring, mentoring, and faculty assistance in the "alleviation of writing anxiety." There is also discussion on embellishing the self-efficiency university students when writing essays.There authors also use gender as a precursor in determining the differences between the efficacy of writing among males and females. In addition to analytical gender studies, the authors also integrate other academic variables such as GPA's and literary composition as a "recreational activity." There is even breathing exercises, methods for relaxation, and interventional aid to students who completely reprehend writing all together. This is article is definitely pertinent to the academically overstressed life of university students; especially, students enrolled in an English course. At a certain point, we all experience unpalatable junctures of unwanted anxiety, that by any means, impedes our ability to academically perform. It is very similar to the dynamics of examination anxiety. A student may have acknowledgments that exceed the finite boundaries of an exam, but cannot access their superior level of comprehension because of their cognitively, suppressive test anxiety. The word "test," "examination," or "dissertation" have become connotatively dreadful; however, replacing these words with academic euphemisms such as "long quiz" or "filling paper words project" could potentially reduce oppressive, academic anxiety-in a sense. Judging by all of the diagrams of everyone's writing process, I'd say the extraneous variety of distractions can all result from, or even cause, anxiety.

The article written by ERIC (The Educational Resources Information Center) which I must assume is a part of George Washington Univ. Washington DC. Graduate School of Education and Human Development is a broken down "checklist" of sorts. It addresses six different concerns with grading student's writing. One such concern is one I think we all might have asked ourselves at one point in time, "Why do professors need to construct effective writing assignments?"(3). The answer given to the question was interesting in that it pushed hard for effective peer reviews. While some peer review is helpful the article did address the fact that most students are unaware of how to give effective peer review. The basics of the article concerning peer review are that professors need to help students learn by example and explanation. I thought it interesting as well that the article addressed how professors can avoid giving a grade that they will have to defend after the fact, a problem for professors who grade writing without a series of rewriting stages. The solution offered is, that's right, stages of rewrites with the professor holding off giving a grade for as long as possible. One important idea brought up in the article is that "…the writing assignment should include necessary information about audience and purpose, the two pillars of writing."(3) I often wonder how we focus on the first and not the second. As the article states one of the pillars of writing is purpose, yet we seem to habitually focus on the audience and not give student's a purpose for their writing.

Tong's post! This article is about the complication of academic writing. It identifies some of the difficulties in understanding an academic paper. Through anthropologist view they point out that academic writing are becoming more and more complex due to many reasons like the contents of the paper, the vocabularies including syntax and discourse. It mentions something that has to do with "technical and/or scientific writing" and the relation to countries that are working to "catch up". And how it would be a hard task in helping them to understand what's really being done. People were being hired to make the text more comprehensible to other readers. Academic writing is like making/ stating an idea in a complex ways by the uses of complex vocabularies. One important thing I found interesting and true for myself is the way student approach academic writing. Students only skim over articles to get a sense of what's being said rather than reading to "make use of the information." Then I thought could it be that students have to write on multiple articles and while in school we takes several classes that are not related to the same thing/topic and therefore our reading and writing are does not focus on the same genres or format.

This is from the library's scholarly database, you will need to login to view it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This article examines the reasons university students have anxiety over writing and/or confidence in their writing. I was especially interested because of the focus on genders. The authors hypothesize that female students are more likely to experience anxiety in their writing because of a difficulty in navigating the power structures that are academic discourse, and that male students are more confident in their writing than females even when there is no difference in ability. The article conducts a study of 127 college students at a public university near the Texas-Mexico border.

This article is geared more towards translation but I've found that many of the same principles of translation can be applied when trying to write academically. We are doing nothing more than trying to translate our thoughts and complex ideas and put them into the language of academic writing - usually a foreign language to us. Because I am writing on cultural barriers to academic writing, I thought it would be useful to see how other minds work. In this way we might be more empathetic to our students and it might aid our diagnostics as well. The author, Dirk Siepmann, compares the academic writing of English, French and German. "For a long time the idea has been around that the 'spirit' of a language exerts a formative influence on its speakers and writers" (Siepmann 1). This influence is something that educators need to be aware of when teaching writing. How can you help transition students into a different academic writing culture without making them give up their own? Siepmann also discusses what he refers to as "Intellectual Styles." He calls these the "Saxon", the "Teutonic", the "Gallic" and the "Nipponic". He has derived these terms based on writers' ability to organize thought, target audience, relationship of writer to audience and other criteria. The author also talks about the differences in learning systems and what is expected in those learning systems.

According to the article, the critical difference between high school and college is that "high school education is designed to be standardized and quantifiable," while "college education is designed to be theoretical" (Fanetti 78). However, the authors do not lay the blame with either the high school or college writing instructors. Instead, the blame lies with standardized testing in high school curriculum. To meet standards, high school instructors must sacrifice certain types of writing for 'test writing', even though standardized test writing virtually disappears after high school. Thus, the skills needed for standardized test writing must be untaught in college. This seems wasteful for high school and college instructors. The article compares high school to a factory, in which the student is the product and standardized testing is quality control. Through the process, students become "mass-produced and measured everywhere by the same instrument" (Fanetti 80). To close the gap between high school and college, the authors' suggest that the purpose of high school should be redesigned completely. High school curriculum should view all students as college bound, whether they truly are or not. This will great better writing skills for all students and prevent extra work for secondary and post-secondary instructors. Also, we need to get rid of standardized testing completely since it does more damage than good, especially in the writing skills of students.

This is an interesting review/exploration by Jill Parrot of Eastern Kentucky University of David Foster's book "Writing with Authority". Parrot explains that Foster's book compares and contrasts the German university writing systems with American ones to examine the effects of each on a college student's confidence and self-efficacy in writing. Foster's thesis begins, "Undergraduates should learn how to write as knowledge-makers, developing the capacities for self-direction, long-term goal setting, and cumulative, recursive task development and writing," thus setting up the focus of the study. He argues that while there are pros and cons to each country's academic practices, the German system's focus on gradual development and self-direction with frequent interaction and discussion in the early stages helps to create a more long-term oriented view of the writing process and to establish the students as authorities on a topic that they may spend a great deal of time with. Without having access to the book itself, this article serves as a very thorough analysis of the text and I found this to be very informative.