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Presented as a conversation rather than as a single-voiced academic paper, this paper describes the three people's experiences with experimental academic writing as students and as teachers. It describes such writing (or autobiographical scholarship) as a hybrid blend of autobiographical bits and scholarship, writing and reading, public and private, accessibility and specificity which is inspired by or collaborates with feminist, anti-elitist, multi-ethnic, reader-response, ecocritical, and postmodern theories. The paper then describes teaching experimental kinds of writing alongside more traditional forms, and notes that experimental writing helps students who have felt less engaged with standard academic writing to discover voices they had closeted and enables them to enter the conversation where conformity to standard approaches had left them mute. According to the paper, the writing teachers have also noted that experimental writing draws students into what they are writing about in interesting ways. It is then noted that experimental writing raises new questions about evaluating writing--evaluating experimental writing requires more dialogue with the writer to understand the experiment. The paper concludes that although experimental writing requires more dialogue with students, teachers think of their students more as writers and the students respond more as writers--with skills, knowledge, intention, and an ability and desire to learn and to use writers' tools. (RS)

Contributed by English teachers across the United States, the activities contained in this booklet are intended to promote the effective teaching of writing and literature. Teaching strategies offered in the first section of the booklet are designed to stimulate language exploration and include activities in which students write family newspapers that include the proper journalistic components; use clustering to write poetry; and use a variety of artistic media to illustrate the landscape of Dante's "Inferno." Activities in the second section, which are designed to stimulate an appreciation and understanding of literature, include discussions in which students cast actors to star in novels the class is studying; select a dozen powerful quotations from Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and then investigate how Stephen Spielberg treated these passages in his film of the novel; and adopt journalistic roles that enable them to produce a historical newspaper from a time and place depicted in a novel. Teaching ideas in the third section provide the means for students to learn about various stages of the writing process. These include activities in which students become consumer reporters; engage in mocked-up conversations for practice in writing dialogue; and make "poetry earrings" by writing pithy metaphoric statements or haikus on small, rectangular pieces of paper. (SAM)

A response to the educator's confusion over how to teach critical thinking skills through writing, the writing process model described in this paper underlines the close ties among cognitive, language, and writing skills. Guiding writing assignments in all content areas, the model involves students in reflection and discussion as they move from prewriting strategies to first draft, revision, proof reading and final paper. Based on this model, a writing assignment would establish a purpose and an audience (other than the teacher/editor) and would use warmup games as part of brainstorming activities; interactive discussions of paper topics and sample essays to help students refine and organize their ideas; and peer and teacher reactions to rough drafts to encourage self-assessment and to help students generate their own thoughtful questions about their writing. (MM)

Observation and investigation indicate that academic writing tasks are generally quite different from those required in standard English composition courses, with respect to both process and product. Writing instruction in English as a second language should prepare students for subject-matter writing tasks, focusing less on pure composition. Academic writing tasks require little generating of ideas, but do require selecting, organizing, and expressing specific information, either in response to an essay question or in an informative paper where there is little room for personal opinion. Classroom writing exercises found to be effective in producing transferable writing skills in students include: (1) sentence combining exercises of a paragraph that provide a check on reading comprehension, elicit specific grammar points, convey information, and model suitable information and organization types; (2) writing from data in non-prose form; (3) sentence forming from lists of bits of information; (4) reading selections in preparation for answering questions; and (5) writing from lectures, with or without accompanying readings. (MSE)