This article seeks to present a model of critical factors that influence writing transfer by exploring and extending conversations happening in the field. The article identifies five critical and interconnected factors that support writing transfer: connection, perception, reflection, disposition, and fortification. These factors emerge from an integration of writing transfer scholarship and data from a longitudinal study of student writers. In that study, six participants were followed for seven years (from first-year composition past graduation and into the workforce) and asked to explain their experiences and perceptions of writing. I offer these five factors to spark a broader conversation about how multiple overlapping influences contribute to writing transfer and to encourage further research into how these factors interact and reinforce one another.

This empirical study of a virtual writing marathon (Write Across America) theorizes a dynamic online ecosystem in which the five realms—virtual place, design, writing, sharing, and emotion—interact in the process of writing. The study has implications for students and for the professional development of writing instructors.

This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.

Empirical research on composing processes is virtually absent in our field. What do contemporary writers actuallydowhen they compose? I argue that we need a return to research on composing processes, as writers are every day weaving together the social and cognitive through writing. One writer’s composing process think-aloud suggests how some writers today weave together cognitive and cultural processes of meaning making in ways unimagined at the time of the last composing process research.

Report on a longitudinal study of transfer, investigating dispositions in two participants’ internships. Prior knowledge helped one student overcome negative attitudes toward school. With less experience and disruptive dispositions, the second student was less successful. Thick descriptions of their experiences are followed by implications for supporting transfer in internships and for future research.

Tracy Santa and Harvey Wiener have each written a commentary on Andrea A. Lunsford and Karen J. Lunsford’s article Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study, which appeared in the June 2008 issue of CCC.

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error patterns.

This essay reports on the first two years of the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study aimed at describing as accurately as possible all the kinds of writing students perform during their college years. Based on an early finding about the importance students attach to their out-of-class or self-sponsored writing and subsequent interviews with study participants, we argue that student writing is increasingly linked to theories and practices of performance. To illustrate the complex relationships between early college writing and performance, we explore the work of two study participants who are also coauthors of this essay.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.

Drawing upon their longitudinal study of four undergraduate writers and focusing on the progress of one of them, the authors question assumptions that confuse skills assessment with the measurement of academic and personal development. They argue for a broader view of writing development and a teaching approach that fosters it.

How can we prepare the workforce of tomorrow to meet the increasing writing demand placed upon them in the Information Age? In this text, Anne Beaufort provides a multidimensional response to this critical question. Through analyzing the knowledge domains writers draw upon in specific writing situations, Beaufort illuminates the conditions that contribute to the ongoing development of writing skills. Using findings gathered in a longitudinal study of four women, Beaufort renders an ethnographical account of how writers are socialized into ways of communicating according to the conventions of their workplace. Beaufort offers a view of the developmental process entailed in attaining writing fluency in school and beyond, and the conditions that contribute to acquiring such expertise. Her book illuminates what it takes to foster the flexibility and versatility writers must possess in the workplace of the 21st century.

Intended for writing instructors at all levels who lack the training to deal effectively with the increasingly important role played by empirical research in their field, Composition Research explains ten of the most common empirical designs used in the social sciences. These include: case study, ethnography, sampling/survey, quantitative descriptive research, prediction and classification studies, true and quasi-experiments, meta-analysis, and program evaluation. Each design is explained with reference to at least two specific composition studies, and includes a separate bibliography that identifies further writing studies that use it. The book also features a chapter on measurement, an appendix on statistical analyses, a glossary of technical terms and symbols, and guidelines for research on human subjects.

Old Interests and New Demands The Normative Logic of Experimental Design What Happens When All Other Things Are Not Equal? Obtaining Comparable Groups Equivalence of Treatment for Different Groups Limitations of Simple Descriptions of Group Differences Relating Group Differences to Underlying Causes Comparing Tasks and Groups Comparing Patterns of Performance The Group by Tack Interaction Approach Training Studies Cautionary Notes Model-based Approaches Qualitative information-processing Models Computer Simulation Models Mathematical Models Functional Measurement Advantages of Model-based Research Strategies Cautionary Notes From Laboratory to Life Comparing Laboratory and Real-Life Tacks Training Cognitive Processes Training Tacks of Practical Importance Value Judgments in Cognitive Research On the Reference of Basic Research Appendix. Statistical Issues in Comparative Research Attempts to Control for Pre-existing Group Differences Interpreting Group by Task Interactions References Notes Index