4,658 research outputs found

    Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1

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    Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide-range of topics about writing, much like the model made famous by Wendy Bishop’s “The Subject Is . . .” series. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about developing nearly every aspect of the craft of writing. Consequently, each essay functions as a standalone text that can easily complement other selected readings in writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/books/1002/thumbnail.jp

    South African travel writing and bias

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    Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-96).This thesis spotlights the travel and leisure magazine industry within South Africa. It contends that the travel writing genre is susceptible to a number of biases, both past and present, which ultimately affect the way its overall content is produced and presented to the public. This work was substantiated through a set of qualitative interviews with key professionals within the South African travel and leisure magazine industry, as well as through a theme- based content analysis of a number of local travel writing publications. This study adds to a rather extensive line of research written on the topic of travel writing regarding a number of older criticisms of bias including 'othering', escapism, and gendering. However, it also focuses on a number of more modem biases such as direct advertising, advertorial usage, as well as the acceptance of 'freebies' and barter agreements, none of which has been given much attention in previous research. The sheer existence of these and other biases within the modem South African travel and leisure magazine industry exhibits an absolute necessity of examination into such a topic, especially given the importance and overall influence that the travel writing industry has on a country's economic standing and overall image

    L2 creative writers : identities and writing processes

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    L2 creative writing research is a relatively unchartered area. Pedagogical discussions on L2 creative writing activities often focus on manifestations of L2 learners' language learning, writing improvement, or expressions of emotion. There is a lack of research investigating the underlying identities of L2 creative writers as social agents. The present research targets the L2 creative writers who are interested and experienced in certain forms of creative writing. It investigates if and how L2 creative writers' emergent identities enacted in their online cognitive writing activities under particular tasks are mediated by the writers' 'autobiographical identities' (Clark and Ivanič, 1997) rooted in their life histories. Fifteen L2 creative writers from diverse sociocultural and academic backgrounds participated in the research. Firstly, the participants' 'autobiographical identities' were explored through eliciting their retrospective life-history accounts in in-depth interviews. Secondly, the research implemented two think-aloud story-writing sessions (Autobiographical writing & Prompted story-continuation writing) to capture the writers' emergent identities instantiated in their cognitive writing processes. Subsequently, the interconnectedness between these two types of identities was sought. Two parallel data analyses were conducted: 1) quantitative data coding targeting all fifteen L2 creative writers and 2) qualitative discussions concentrating on five selected focal participants. These two levels of analyses together show that the participants' cognitive writing processes as evinced through their engagement in these creative writing activities (i.e. their task-situated emergent identities) are mediated by the writers’ previous participation in multiple discourses and social worlds up to the moment of writing (i.e. their autobiographical identities formed throughout their life histories). The findings suggest certain directions for theory development in L2 creative writing research as well as in L2 writer identity research. Regarding L2 creative writing research, L2 teachers' practice could be enhanced by a deeper understanding of how creative writing is employed by L2 individuals not only for language or literacy acquisition purposes, but also as a self-empowering tool to achieve particular social positioning. Secondly, regarding L2 writer identity research, more research needs to be done regarding this micro and dynamic view of writer identity which resides in the movements of the writers' emerging thoughts situated in an immediate creative writing context and mediated by the writers' previous sociocultural experiences

    A narrative-based collaborative writing tool for coherent technical documents

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    One important feature of an effective document that makes it easy to read and understand is known as coherence. Technical documents produced collaboratively are often incoherent due to a lack of group consensus and misaligned contributions by the individual authors. However, current document planning techniques and writing tools do not provide explicit support for improving coherence. The goal of this research, therefore, is to develop and evaluate a new technique and tool that helps teams of authors to structure coherent technical documents. The coherence of a document can be attributed to the story (or narrative) it conveys to the reader. If this story is consistent and coherent, the same can be said about the document. A discourse theory such as Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that has been developed by linguists helps further to analyse and improve a narrative. RST explains the coherence of a text by virtue of relationships (such as “paragraph A justifies paragraph B”) between parts of the text. This research has combined the ideas from these parallel strands of research to develop a new document planning technique called narrative-based writing. The method involves writing down an explicit précis of the story (called a document narrative or DN) and then analysing it using RST. The DN and RST analysis are then used to structure the eventual document. To extend the usability of narrative-based writing to geographically-dispersed authors, I have designed and implemented a collaborative tool that allows co-authors to edit, analyse and review DNs. The thorough design for the tool uses a combination of three models (conceptual, business process and functional) culminating in a set of functions that enable collaborative narrative-based writing. This dissertation discusses how, in the future, these functions could be incorporated in existing collaborative writing tools. Implementing this tool, albeit in its current prototypic state, has been invaluable in understanding the complexities of modelling and manipulating DNs and RST structures. Initial investigations using the new technique and tool have been positive, encouraging me to continue the research and evaluation in this field

    Academic authorship: who, why and in what order?

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    We are frequently asked by our colleagues and students for advice on authorship for scientific articles. This short paper outlines some of the issues that we have experienced and the advice we usually provide. This editorial follows on from our work on submitting a paper1 and also on writing an academic paper for publication.2 We should like to start by noting that, in our view, there exist two separate, but related issues: (a) authorship and (b) order of authors. The issue of authorship centres on the notion of who can be an author, who should be an author and who definitely should not be an author, and this is partly discipline specific. The second issue, the order of authors, is usually dictated by the academic tradition from which the work comes. One can immediately envisage disagreements within a multi-disciplinary team of researchers where members of the team may have different approaches to authorship order

    Writing centers; HBCUs; and first-year classrooms: Facilitating active writing pedagogies through universal design

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    This group presentation and workshop responds to the conference call’s acknowledgement of the potential tensions between active learning and access (UDL) in the teaching of writing, and the need for these lines of pedagogical thought and practice to come together. Each of these terms (writing; active learning; and access) is at risk of becoming over simplified in its reification, maybe especially when it is paired with other terms under investigation. Writing can be seen as a decontextualized “skill” rather than a situated social action; active learning can also be seen as decontextualized, a good in its own right, and be premised on a homogenized, certainly nondisabled student; and access can be seen as an institutional achievement (“We held/attended the UDL workshop”) rather than an ongoing challenge to opening up all aspects of our classrooms and practice. We are particularly interested in contexts where active writing pedagogy is already occasioned, but where students can be exposed to unpredictable barriers. For example, a student with learning disabilities might be negatively impacted by active learning strategies that require the immediate assessing and mobilizing of information through writing in a group situation; a student from a low-socioeconomic background might feel exposed when required to share previous knowledge with peer tutors in the writing centre. Both of these examples need universal design strategies for the active learning approach to succeed.Not peer reviewe

    Writing for the profession: The experience of new professionals

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    The purpose of this article is to explore barriers and motivators for new professionals who write and present for the professional literature. Authors from the ALIA New Librarians’ Symposium held in December 2006 in Sydney, Australia were surveyed about their experiences of writing and presenting early in their career. The author of this paper was the symposium’s programme coordinator. The majority of authors were working in Australia, and few were required to write or present as part of their work role. In the absence of this requirement, factors that motivate new professionals to write can be difficult to define. Barriers to writing include time, skills, and responsibilities outside work

    Recorded-voice formative assessment for creative writing students: a case study

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    Assessment has been called the most important element of pedagogy. The significant personal investment that Creative Writing students often have in their submissions introduces another factor for consideration. For this cohort, if not more generally, written feedback would appear to be inferior to assessment provided in recorded-voice form. Analysis of the results of a small-scale case study conducted by the author supports this claim. A proposition by Susan Sontag, that hearing provides a better way of knowing than seeing, generates a theoretical expression of the same idea. Sontag links knowing through hearing to the notion of responsiveness: hearing is more personal than seeing. Developers of effective assessment packages should take this into account. My study also underscored the importance of process for Creative Writing students in the assessment situation.Arts, Education & Law Group, School of Humanities, Languages and Social SciencesFull Tex
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