One of the crucial cognitive processes in academic writing is that of problem-finding in the critical reading stage before planning an essay. With the focus of our study being on the process of critical reading—a writer’s in-depth reading of an article in order to find issues that are capable of being addressed from her/his viewpoint—we are currently on the way to developing an affective critic...

This research is an analysis of88 first-year portfolio cover letters from the Spring 2000 English 102 Program Assessment at the University of Nevada, Reno. This analysis focuses on what these students viewed as the rhetorical purposes of cover letters. The goal of this study was to apply the theories of Aristotle, Toulmin, and Burke to these letters to analyze their appellate, argumentative, an...

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students’ textbased writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students’ mastery of analytic textbased writing. Textbased writing tasks (N = 149) were collected from 27 fifthgrade teachers ...

Few would disagree that high quality thinking is a necessary condition for high quality writing. Yet, writing courses in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) often focus only marginally on principled and rigorous development of dialogical thinking and idea generation in preparation for written work. This study examines the effect of a model of critical thinking instruction (CTI) in a university ...

Research towards automated feedback can build on the work in other areas. In this paper we explore question generation techniques. Most research in question generation has focused on generating content specific questions that help students comprehend a set of documents that they must read. However, this approach is not so useful in writing activities, as students would generally understand the ...

In this introduction to a special issue of Computers and Composition, the authors critically review current literature on computer-assisted writing pedagogies that grapple with issues of sexuality. Although this body of work is small, it points to provocative ways to develop our students’ critical and rhetorical sensibilities about the constructions of sexuality in our culture. Further, such wo...