The author inquires about why students dislike writing. Bricker presents a case in her inquiry that addresses the student's problem through one on one discussion. Her case lifted the student's aversion to writing by showing him directly that he was able to write without realizing it. This article really brings to light the importance of identifying negative attitudes towards writing and paying close attention to the student's psychological reaction to writing. In doing so, teachers can adjust the dialogue to get a more eager response to write from students having difficulties with writing. One significant idea presented in this inquiry is allowing students to write what they want to say rather than what the teacher wants to hear. This gives teachers and future teachers a big clue as to what possible circumstances prevent students from writing and ones that encourage them to write.

Day's article discusses the various beliefs and habits that contribute to writer's block. Many of these beliefs include sets of rules that are heavily rigid and grammatical rather than content. Day suggests that writers that go through their writing with little rigidity and skimming over the editing process while writing is a preventative strategy to overcome writer's block. This article brought into view the point that, most of our writer's block comes from rules that disrupt the flow of writing and content. For the most part, students hang on to rules that are grammatical or structural plans that attempt to perfect writing on the first draft. I think this can be valuable to teachers because when we identify the cognitive strategies preventing students from writing, we can instruct them how to overcome those strategies to develop ones that help students with writing.

The Cognitive Revolution article takes into account the various psychological theories applied in the field towards language. One particular theory called into question by Miller is behaviorism. Having been a Behaviorist himself, Miller examines his previous biases about language in relation to Chomsky's theories of grammar. Miller finds that in adopting Chomsky's view of grammar, we bring the mind and cognitive process back into our understanding of language. In relation to grammar, Miller states "The grammatical rules that govern phrases and sentences are not behavior. They are mentalistic hypotheses about the cognitive processes responsible for the verbal behaviors we observe." This article is really helpful in providing teachers information about where some of our language theories come from and how they have shifted in practice after behaviorism. I think the most important point here is to not make the same mistakes with behaviorism as done in the past. The assumptions of behaviorism applied in the teaching can have some devastating consequences in student writing. Since teachers have the potential to exploit the cognitive processes using stimulus and response, it's possible that teachers may or may not be aware of the consequences if they happen to instill negative writing habits and attitudes in students using the assumptions implied in behaviorist theory. Having the definition of grammar rules Miller states, it provides teachers a working definition and inquiry to better understand how we form grammar rules, and what strategies students are using to apply grammar and form rules of their own.

Becker's article discusses the various models researchers have used to blueprint the cognitive process writers use during revision. The discussion associated with these models came from Becker's inquiry on why novice writers have negative attitudes towards the revision process in comparison to more experienced writers. The goal of this research was to make explicit the most effective and efficient cognitive strategies teachers could use to help novice writers improve their revision process. Most of the models consist of evaluation skills and long-term memory associations. I find this article useful for teaching writing in the sense that it has potential apparatuses that teachers can use to motivate students to revise their work. Because revision is an important and sometimes complex part of the writing process, these models may serve useful or may serve as templates for other models to arise when applied to teaching. The important thing here is finding ways to encourage students to revise their work and examine what processes students use to motivate them to revise rather than have students assume their work is already perfect.

Luberda's essay is a preliminary overview of his experiment in applying cognitive science to writing. Luberda suggests that the most applicable elements of cognitive science for teaching writing and composition come from linguistics. He also suggests that in teaching writing and literature, students may be accustomed to learning terms, dates, facts, and test-taking, while others receive a vague understanding of literature. In light of the teaching structures he used, the writing and analytical skills the students acquired were independent of the literature in their course. In using the cognitive approach, Luberda structured writing and literature courses within the context of differentiating relations between language change and writing acquisition. In reading the positive results of Luberda's experiment, I noticed a few implications for teaching writing. One advantage of applying linguisitics and the cognitive approach is that students learn why they write the way they do and raises awareness to the writing structures they use. The other advantage is the ability for students to "say what I mean" and incorporate accuracy in their writing when communicating meaning. This would mean that even when students are intentionally manipulating writing structures within various genres, they are learning to communicate "what I mean" without being submissive to directness. There was one negative result of the experiment where a student stated "I don't believe this course has helped me improve my writing skills. In high school I was taught how to write analyze books and then write papers about them using solid grammar, intense vocab, thesis statement and a well thought out conclusion. I do not believe I learned how to improve my papers. I am still on the same level of writing as I was in high school." I find this to be interesting in relation to teaching writing because it suggests that cognitively, we strive to use writing structures differently or advance our writing by chan