This study contributes to the emerging research on generative AI and writing pedagogy by exploring how college writing students make use of GAI when offered instruction in a range of responsible uses and latitude to integrate it into their writing process as they see fit. We analyzed chat log data and papers from participants recruited from six sections in which students were guided in experimenting with ChatGPT Plus and permitted to use it to produce up to 50% of submitted work. Through a combination of AI and human thematic content analysis of student chat logs, we found that in 18.6% of prompts, students asked ChatGPT to write for them. The rest of the prompts involved work leading up to or in support of the writing process. Human thematic content analysis of papers showed that students used ChatGPT to generate 8.2% of the writing they submitted. The most common rhetorical purpose of the AI-generated text they included was discussion/analysis/synthesis. English as a foreign language students (EFLs) in the sample prompted ChatGPT to clarify understanding less often than non-EFLs and integrated less AI-generated text into their papers, with a particularly notable difference in their use of AI-generated summaries. This unexpected finding merits further research, but it suggests that EFLs may use GAI for somewhat different purposes than non-EFL peers.

This special issue of the Journal of Writing Research brings together seven empirical studies of the relationship between writing and generative AI, examining what can be systematically observed and measured about the functioning of generative AI in educational and professional writing contexts. Collectively, the studies demonstrate the necessity and value of methodological pluralism for investigating a complex, rapidly evolving phenomenon. In their contributions, the researchers use experimental comparisons, mixed-methods intervention designs, corpus-based analyses, computational linguistic techniques, and qualitative interpretive approaches. Taken together, these methods enable lines of inquiry that no single approach could sustain: comparisons of AI and human performance in professional writing tasks; analyses of how writers at different ages and levels of expertise engage AI tools; examinations of how assessment systems register and respond to AI-generated prose; and investigations of how human readers interpret texts with ambiguous authorship. By foregrounding both the affordances and limitations of different methodological traditions, the articles present a multifaceted approach to the study of writing and generative AI.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, the use of and debate around generative AI has grown rapidly. Professionals whose work depends on writing have expressed concern about the potential impact of such tools on their roles. But are these concerns justified? Can ChatGPT truly take on the responsibilities of a professional writer? This study investigates that question by comparing the performance of ChatGPT with that of professional editors tasked with optimizing business communication. We conducted two studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first, three experienced editors were asked to rewrite four business letters. Their editing processes were recorded using the Microsoft Snipping Tool, and immediately afterward, we conducted retrospective interviews using stimulated recall. These interviews were transcribed and analyzed. Insights from the observations and interviews informed the design of the prompt instructions used in the second study. In the second study, we asked ChatGPT to revise the same four letters using three different prompt types. The Simple prompt instructed the model to “make this text reader-focused.” The B1 prompt referred explicitly to the CEFR B1 language level, requiring ChatGPT to tailor the text for intermediate readers. Finally, the Process prompt simulated the editing steps observed in the professional editors’ workflows. To evaluate outcomes, we conducted both a qualitative comparison of the revised texts and a quantitative readability analysis using LiNT, a validated tool developed for Dutch texts. Our results show that the human editors substantially improved the readability of the original letters, reducing the use of unfamiliar words, shortening complex sentences, and increasing personal engagement through pronoun use. Among the AI outputs, ChatGPT B1 achieved results most comparable to the editors, both in readability and accuracy. In contrast, ChatGPT Simple fell short in terms of clarity and introduced errors through faulty inferences. Surprisingly, ChatGPT Process also underperformed compared to ChatGPT B1 and the human editors. Only the editors' and ChatGPT B1versions were free from errors. In the discussion, we reflect on how generative AI is reshaping the concept of writing within organizations, the skills required to produce effective written communication and the impact on writing pedagogy. Rather than replacing human editors, we argue that generative AI can play a valuable role as a collaborative tool in the organizational writing process.

This study focuses on a generative AI approach to facilitate qualitative analysis in Writing Studies research. We gathered 13,336 one-sentence to one-paragraph responses written by 3,334 incoming students in a directed self-placement program administered at a large R1 U.S. university. In these responses, students describe their high school writing experience and college writing expectations. In stage one of the project, we pilot the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation to expedite the selection of relevant responses for a topic—in this case, students’ positive self-assessments as writers. The selected responses were then compared to a random sample and rated by three faculty with writing expertise. In stage two, these faculty generated codes and themes from a subset of the responses, incorporating ChatGPT-4 through the stages of thematic analysis. Results show that the use of AI expedites and enhances qualitative analysis, but human participation in the process is still essential. We suggest a machine-in-the-loop framework with which Writing Studies researchers can more readily integrate generative AI to study large corpora of student writing.

With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, dialogue systems like chatbots are redefining traditional concepts of authorship and impacting critical aspects of writing. In educational contexts, previous research has pointed out new opportunities associated with using chatbots for writing instruction and support. This study involved 108 students across 10 classes in Norwegian K-12 education, examining how they employed educational chatbots as a support tool in L1 writing assignments. Through an inductive, data-driven thematic analysis of 895 student prompts, five recurring patterns emerged: information requests, structural guidance, example requests, content creation, feedback on text, and follow-up clarification. Aggregated results show that information requests were the most common pattern, particularly among younger students, whereas content creation and feedback on text were more prevalent among secondary and upper secondary students. Illustrative examples from the conversations revealed that generative AI extensively produced content on student’s behalf, even when students primarily sought scaffolding. The study proposes that effective scaffolding of writing through educational chatbots requires not only refining students' prompting strategies but also enhancing system designs that better support pedagogical use of generative AI.

To understand how human readers navigate a literate landscape that newly includes AI-generated prose, we asked participants (n=76) to read and make decisions about who and/or what is responsible for writing anonymized, “ambiguously-authored” texts. Findings suggest that readers’ assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text are rooted in “felt sense.” Prompting participants to make their “felt sense” explicit allowed us to catalog the evidential warrants participants relied on when making authorship decisions. Enabled by a modified grounded theory approach to analysis, we constructed two main themes. First, readers are “triggered” by certain textual cues that, when combined with prior experiences and knowledge, evidentially warrant assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text. Second, after recognizing the consequences of making one’s felt sense explicit, some readers experience what we call an “axiological crisis.” Axiological crises emerge when participants meta-cognitively hear or see themselves attributing certain characteristics and values to an AI text-generator or human author. We conclude by reimagining the axiological crisis as an opportunity for improving metacognitive awareness about how felt sense affects our reading practices.

In this study, we examine the feasibility of augmenting student-written essays with those generated by large language models (LLMs) for scoring essays. We found that with correct instructions, generative AI systems such as GPT-4 and GPT-4o can generate essays similar to those written by students in terms of surface-level linguistic features, although material differences may still exist. Systematic analyses revealed that scoring models trained with synthetic data perform comparably to models trained using student essays, but the performance varies across prompts and the sizes of the model training sample. The augmented models could alleviate large discrepancies between human and AI scores on the subgroup level that may be introduced by a lack of training samples for a particular subgroup or due to inherent biases in LLMs. We also explored an established method – DecompX – on token importance to identify and explain AI predictions. Future research directions and limitations of this study are also discussed.

This empirical exploration investigates how integrating a handwritten diary with a generative AI writing companion can strengthen elementary school students' writing habits and interests in a naturalistic classroom setting. The AI companion serves as a personalized assistant, offering real-time ideas, suggestions, and feedback. By encouraging students to handwrite daily experiences and emotions, then digitize their entries, the approach fosters both reflection and skill development. Over 18 weeks, 32 students from grades three to five (average age 10.5 years old) recorded their diary in Chinese and interacted with the AI companion. This exploratory study employed a pre-post, single-group design, analyzing diary entries, interaction logs, and questionnaire data to assess changes in writing participation and interest. The findings indicate three major outcomes: a notable increase in writing participation, reflected by a rise in the number of ideas and entry length; an enhanced level of writing interest, demonstrating the effectiveness of merging traditional handwriting with AI tools; and improved writing behavior through more frequent and diverse writing activities. When students encountered challenges—such as topic selection or content organization—the AI companion supplied up to three suggestions, preventing information overload and preserving independent thinking. Overall, this interactive, AI-supported environment transformed writing from a solitary task into a dynamic, collaborative process, boosting motivation and quality. The study thus illustrates how strategically blending handwritten diary with innovative AI systems can enrich writing education and sustain students' long-term engagement, while acknowledging its exploratory nature and the need for further research to establish causal links.

Many linguistic studies of writing assume a single linear relationship between linguistic features in the text and human judgments of writing quality. However, writing quality may be better understood as a complex latent construct that can be constructed in a number of different ways through different linguistic profiles of high-quality writing styles as shown in Crossley et al. (2014). This study builds on the exploratory study reported by Crossley et al. by analyzing a representational corpus of 4,170 highly rated persuasive essays written by secondary-school students. The study uses natural language processing tools to derive quantitative representations for the linguistic features found in the texts. These linguistic features inform a k-means cluster analysis which indicates that a four-cluster profile best fits the data. By examining the indices most and least distinctive of each cluster, the study identifies a structured writing style, a conversational writing style, a reportive writing style, and an academic writing style. The findings support the notion that writers can employ a variety of writing profiles to successfully write an argumentative essay.

Theoretical models and empirical evidence suggest parental involvement in general education is beneficial for children’s educational outcomes and that motivational factors may contribute to explaining parental involvement in children’s education. Few studies, however, have examined the role of parental involvement in children’s writing outcomes and, to our knowledge, none has investigated the motivations of Parents/Carers to support their children’s writing development in the first place. In this study, we aimed to address this gap by measuring Parents'/Carers' autonomous and controlled motivations for supporting their children’s writing at home and their engagement in writing activities with their children, and then assessing the links between parental motivations and involvement, and children’s writing quality and attitudes toward writing. Participants included 159 Year 2 children and their Parents/Carers. Structural equation modelling showed indirect effects between Parents'/Carers' autonomous motivation and children’s writing quality via the mediators of parental involvement and children’s attitudes towards writing. Conversely, Parents'/Carers' controlled motivation had no significant association with children’s writing outcomes. Findings suggested that, when Parents/Carers are autonomously motivated and involved in writing activities with their children at home, their children show stronger positive attitudes towards writing. Educational implications include encouraging home-school initiatives that foster autonomous motivation in Parents/Carers and support Parents/Carers in engaging in a wide range of enjoyable writing activities with their children at home, creating a community where writing is valued across home and school contexts.

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that primarily affects the semantic and pragmatic aspects of language. The aim of this study was to analyze pragmatics at macrotextual, microtextual and writing levels in persons with schizophrenia in order to ascertain the narrative characteristics and determine the nature of such pragmatics according to positive and negative symptomatology. Cross-sectional and quasi-experimental study was conducted on a sample of 41 individuals with schizophrenia. An analysis of textual pragmatics was performed using the participants’ summary of "The Tale of Landolfo Rufolo". Macrotextual coherence was functional in that it presented key plot information and respected the timeline of the story. Microtextual cohesion was characterized by repetitions, low lexical variation, low syntactic complexity and maintained morphology. The participants' writing was consistent with a generalized dysorthographic profile. In addition, the present work revealed significant differences according to symptomatology. Individuals with positive symptomatology showed lower macrotextual coherence, while microtextual cohesion entailed a greater number of words and therefore greater lexical variation. In contrast, those with negative symptomatology presented a greater dysorthographic profile. This study provides a functional overview of written language in persons with schizophrenia, highlighting the need for a multidisciplinary speech and language therapy intervention to enhance such individuals’ quality of life by favoring their social integration.

Writing from multiple texts is among the most common yet challenging tasks for higher education students. However, limited research has examined the strategies used by these highly competent readers and writers. The present descriptive study examines reading strategy use, writing strategy use, and writing performance in a sample of higher education students enrolled in graduate-level education classes. Students completed a scholarly multiple texts reading-to-write (S-MTRW) task, asking them to read three short research articles and to write a research report while thinking aloud and sharing their screen. Results indicate that students commonly reported evaluating, elaborating, and paraphrasing content during reading. During writing, students commonly engaged in summarizing, composing, and rereading information from the texts provided. Furthermore, the majority of students produced emergent documents models, reflecting limited attempts at synthesis in their writing about the research articles they read. A medium positive correlation was found between the number of instances students reported paraphrasing content while reading and the number of instances of multiple-text integration in students’ writing.

Understanding the temporal organization of writing is key to studying writing processes. Existing methods to segment writing into phases often rely on arbitrary rules, extensive manual annotation, or focus on numerous transitions. This study aimed to develop an automated segmentation method to detect distinctive transition in the dominant writing process, particularly the transition from first draft to revision. For this, keystroke data (source-based L1 writing (N = 80) and text simplification in L2 (N = 88)) were manually annotated. The BEAST algorithm was applied for Bayesian change point detection, based on five characteristics derived from the annotation criteria: (1) percentage of the final text written so far, (2) distance between typed and remaining characters, (3) relative cursor position, (4) source use, and (5) pause timings. The first three features proved most effective in identifying change points. A rule-based approach was further applied to select one final change point, which resulted in mediocre accuracy ranging from 31% exact agreement to 49% agreement within 60 seconds. To conclude, the BEAST algorithm is useful in detecting a variety of change points in writing processes, yet connecting them to meaningful phases is still quite complex.

This study investigated the impact of using ChatGPT 3.5 as a prewriting brainstorming tool on the overall quality of persuasive writing among five gifted seniors majoring in Arabic at the College of Education, Kuwait University. Giftedness, in this study, was not defined by innate advantages such as intelligence quotient (IQ) but was instead viewed from a multidimensional perspective, focusing on academic performance, writing skills, and personal traits that reflect intellectual engagement. Four participants were typically developing gifted students, while one participant was twice exceptional, both gifted and autistic. An integrated single-subject design with multiple probes across multiple baselines was used, with each participant serving as their own control. Repeated measures were used throughout the baseline, intervention, and maintenance phases to monitor intraindividual variability and examine the effectiveness of the intervention. The results indicated a significant increase in mean scores for persuasive essays from baseline to intervention for all participants, with continued improvement during maintenance for all but the twice-exceptional student, whose mean maintenance score remained unchanged from the intervention. While promoting ChatGPT 3.5 as a valuable brainstorming tool for persuasive writing, this study emphasizes its complementary role and recommends that writers engage in brainstorming using multiple resources before writing.

Executive functions are attributed a central role in maintaining fluency during L2 text composition, allowing writers to orchestrate the various linguistic and cognitive processes and resources involved in writing. The study examined (1) whether language proficiency moderates the relationship between executive functions and writing fluency in L2 writing and (2) whether the effects indirectly affect text quality. Sixty university students composed two texts in English as their L2, an argumentation and a description, three executive function tasks assessing inhibition, shifting, and updating skills, a language proficiency test, and a copy task. Keystroke logging protocols were recorded with Inputlog and analyzed for writing fluency. Text quality was assessed with a holistic benchmark procedure and comparative judgments. The results revealed language-dependent and genre-specific effects of updating and shifting but not inhibition skills on writing fluency. Path models indicated that the interactions between executive functions and language proficiency indirectly affect text quality through process-related writing measures. The findings suggest a complex relation between executive functions and writing performance that depends on language proficiency and varies with task demands.

Mirror-writing has consistently intrigued researchers throughout the years. This study is the first to explore Greek-letter and Arabic-digit reversals from typically developing children within the Greek School Environment. The hypotheses were: (1) Visual discrimination, visual memory, and visual-spatial relationships skills will negatively correlate with the occurrence of character reversals, (2) Left-oriented symbols will be reversed most frequently, (3) Children from year 1 will exhibit fewer reversals than children in nurseries. To test those predictions, 117 children (4.5 to 7.5 years) were recruited from Greek nurseries and primary schools. Character-recognition tasks were conducted, and children’s visual-perceptual ability was measured. Moreover, participants produced capital Greek letters and Arabic digits under dictation. Results yielded a significant negative correlation only between visual-perceptual skills and digit reversals in the total sample, suggesting that children with higher visual-perceptual skills tend to produce fewer digit mirrorings, unlike letters. Furthermore, left-oriented characters were significantly mirrored the most. Finally, only digit reversals were significantly reduced by year 1, probably due to the limited knowledge of letters by children in nurseries. Implications, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Despite the growing interest in the dynamics of the writing process in writing research, publicly available large-scale corpora of keystroke logs have been rare. We introduce KLiCKe, a freely available collection of keystroke logs for around 5,000 argumentative texts written by adults in the United States. The KLiCKe corpus also includes human-rated holistic scores for the essays as well as writers' demographic details, their typing skills, and vocabulary knowledge. We describe our methods for constructing the corpus and present descriptives for different components of the corpus. To illustrate the use of the KLiCKe corpus, we report a study using a subset of the corpus to investigate whether keystroke features are associated with holistic writing quality for L1 and L2 writers. The study shows that higher writing scores are related to shorter pauses in general, shorter between-word pauses, lower proportion of deletions, higher proportion of insertions, and less process variance. The KLiCKe corpus provides a robust resource for researchers to study the dynamics of text production and revision that will help spur the development of process-oriented tools and methodologies in writing assessment and instruction.

Generative AI has the potential to transform writing in schools and universities. This makes it necessary to develop training programmes for writing with AI, especially for students in teacher training. So far, however, little is known about the students' initial preconditions on which the trainings can be based upon. Evidence so far has come mainly from observational studies and questionnaire studies examining the frequency and type of AI use. However, the students themselves were not considered, nor the extent to which they can be categorised into groups. In other words, the focus has been on the writing rather than on the writers. To address this gap, the present article analyses data from a survey of N=505 students. To identify writer profiles, i.e. groups of students with comparable characteristics, we apply two-step cluster analysis. The students are clustered based on their use of AI for writing, as well as their level of awareness of AI applications, AI literacy, digital media literacy and writing-related self-concept. The results reveal four clusters, the two largest of which are characterised by the fact that students tend not to use AI, sometimes because they apparently have no awareness of AI, sometimes despite having such awareness. Merely one cluster, which describes 20% of the students, is characterised by regular use of AI for writing. The results therefore provide a useful insight for planning training in the context of university teaching.

Artificial intelligence-based Language Tools (AILTs) are being increasingly used in essay writing in higher education. Its application promotes global and multicultural perspectives in education and plays a critical role in advancing scholarly communication and research dissemination. However, these benefits cannot be measured without also considering student perspectives. This study analyzes the positive and negative aspects identified by students regarding the use of AILTs in their written texts at university. A total of 314 undergraduate and graduate education students were surveyed, and results were analyzed using the Reinert method. The results show that positive aspects are linked to the three pillars of text construction (planning, textualization, and revision). The negative aspects highlight concerns about academic integrity and student competencies. These findings can help guide teachers on how they can promote the responsible and beneficial use of AILTs.

A manuscript’s writing style is central to determining its readership, influence, and impact. Past research has shown that, in many cases, scholars present a unique writing style that is manifested in their manuscripts. In this work, we report a comprehensive investigation into how scholars’ writing styles evolve throughout their careers focusing on their academic relations with their advisors and peers. Our results show that scholars’ writing styles tend to stabilize early on in their careers – roughly around their 13th publication. Around the same time, schol- ars’ departures from their advisors’ writing styles seem to converge as well. Last, collaborations involving fewer scholars, scholars from the same gender, or from the same field of study seem to bring about a great change in their co-authors’ writing styles with younger scholars being especially influenceable. The proposed method can help to investigate the dynamic behavior of academic writing style.

This special issue of Journal of Writing Research addresses the fundamental question of performance units in writing: how can we characterize these units and which theoretical paradigms allow us to describe them? Despite their core role in the writing activity, there is no consensus on the nature of written performance units. In order to progress on this issue, the different articles presented in this special issue shed light on performance units, their description, definition and role in text construction. Different methodological and theoretical approaches, based on behavioral data, with pauses as a central indicator, illustrate how linguistic structures produced in these units constrain written production.

This article reports on a scoping review of the literature exploring the alignment between behavioral and linguistic units in L1 and L2 writing. Behavioral units in writing were assessed using keystroke logging measures of pauses, bursts, and revisions. Linguistic units were operationalized based on lexical and syntactic definitions from the literature. Nine empirical studies met the inclusion criteria. Most of these studies focused on L1 English writing by adult participants, although some explored other first languages, such as German, Dutch, and French. The identified L2 studies focused exclusively on English. Due to the limited number and high heterogeneity of the studies, no definitive conclusions can be drawn. However, meaningful links between behavioral and linguistic units were detected. In addition to confirming some previously known phenomena, the studies provided new evidence on online processing during pauses, revealed certain idiosyncrasies in L1 versus L2 writing cognition, and offered new insights into the nature of revision. We provide a critical interpretation of the results, propose new research directions, and recommend solutions.

This contribution aims to address the following question: "What types of linguistic units constitute a step in writing process?". The authors propose a pragmatics of the textualization process, emphasizing the significance of operations in constructing meaning during the production of text. Using the example of "enunciative irruptions", they explore the difference between edition (i.e. mental elaboration of the linguistic signs to be emitted) and emission units, revealing instances where verbal elements are born during emission. The study concludes with a phenomenology of textualization, interpreting these operations as meaningful behaviors that reflect the writer's process of discovery and self-construction. The authors argue for a closer examination of production writings, despite the lack of direct temporal data, as it aligns the analyst with the writer's use of this type of documents experience and emphasizes the importance of textualization operations over pauses in understanding the dynamics of written production.

This study investigates how pausing behaviour within a writing session is associated with the writer's language proficiency, focusing on Finnish and Swedish as both first language (L1) and learner language (L2). The data were collected through keyboard logging software and evaluated using CEFR-based assessments of the resulting texts. The relationship was analysed using ordinal mixed-effects logistic regression modelling, where proficiency is modelled as a function of various variables related to pausing behaviour. The results show that the L2 writing process reflects the writer's proficiency. However, there is a significant difference between L2 writers of Swedish and L2 writers of Finnish compared to L1 writers. The advanced L2 writers of Swedish behave similarly to the L1 Swedish writers. In contrast, even the most advanced L2 writers of Finnish have pause lengths and linguistic contexts that are more similar to the less advanced L2 writers than the L1 writers. In addition, the pauses between words do not indicate any clear proficiency-related patterning, leaving only within-word pauses as a robust indicator of proficiency, especially in Swedish. Unlike most writing process research, this study's parallel design allows for contrasting two typologically diverging languages while controlling for other contextual variables. Future studies could explore the grammatical nature of pause locations across the analysed languages.

Experienced creative writers (n=10) participated in an observational eye tracking study with corresponding video and cued retrospective response interview. The eye tracking data and video informed the subsequent interviews focused on identifying written performance indicators. The following question guided the study: What performance indicators from experienced creative writers can be surfaced through a combination of eye tracking, video, and cued retrospective response within an ecologically grounded writing task? Triangulation of the data yielded 10 experienced creative writing performance indicators. Performance indicators from these experienced creative writers are notably combinatorial and map onto cognitive functions such as long-term working memory, phonological loop, and visuospatial activity in writing. Experienced creative writers also purposefully create the conditions for dispositionally guided text production.

Bursts of writing, extracted from online recordings of the writing process, have proved an invaluable vantage point into the cognitive mechanisms at work during written language production. Crucially, they show that writers, much like speakers, produce language through a sequence of small ‘chunks’, patterns-like groupings of words that do not necessarily match the structures of theoretical grammars. As such, they are intriguing objects, whose linguistic properties are yet to be understood. To contribute to this endeavor, we track all instances of French so-called clitic subjects in a corpus of 81 keylogs of short essays written by undergraduate students in experimental conditions. We show that these clitic subjects are attracted to the burst-initial position, favoring resumption of the production after revision events. Moreover, they also act like discursive hubs in that writers are more likely to revise up to a clitic subject and restart from there, possibly relying on an entirely different structure. Therefore, they play the role of landmarks in the writing process, from which information can flow, and to which writers can get back to develop alternative discursive strategies. These results hint that the writing process and the information structure of the product are likely to be intimately intricated.

Linguistic modeling of the writing process has gained in importance in recent years. Existing models, both from a linguistic perspective focusing on syntactic analyses as used in natural language processing and from writing research, are insufficient to actually linguistically explain what authors do when writing and revising. Writing is linear in time, but writers are free to move to any point in the text produced so far whenever they want, thus producing specific parts (e.g., sentences) in a non-linear fashion. However, the final product is a linear sequence of sentences. We therefore can interpret writing texts as a sentence-driven process. In this new framework, this article proposes a model of the production of sentences during writing. This sentence-centric model builds on existing considerations of transforming sequences, bursts and revisions, and takes into account aspects of linearity and non-linearity on the sentence level. We present a working implementation (available as open source software) and show which information can be gained by the resulting analyses in a small case study.

Conceptualizing, Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Writing Interventions, edited by Fien De Smedt, Renske Bouwer, Teresa Limpo, and Steve Graham, emerges as a comprehensive guide for researchers navigating the many steps to developing a writing intervention. Writing interventions are changes to a writer’s traditional approach which are meant to improve a writer’s cognitive processes in order to become a more skilled writer. These interventions are often implemented in classrooms, from primary schools to post-secondary education. This volume offers a start-to-finish overview of the intervention research process. The structure mirrors its title, dividing its contents into four crucial stages of intervention research. These stages are grounded in previous volumes on writing intervention research in the Brill Studies in Writing Series, which provide insight into how writing interventions have changed over the years and demonstrate a pattern of research design. Additionally, the need for a shared framework is emphasized through both reports from the National Commission on Writing (2004) and influential writing models by Graham (2018a, 2018b) and Hayes (2012), which recognize the significance of motivational factors in writing.

Writing about traumas can influence mood and bodily changes. In three studies we researched the influence of writing on affective and physiological changes by measuring electrodermal activity (EDA) during expressive writing sessions and manipulating self-distancing. In Study 1, we randomly assigned 57 participants to write about control or expressive topics using a first-person perspective (I). In Study 2, we assigned 55 participants to write about control or expressive topics using a third-person perspective (She/He). And in Study 3, we compared the effects of perspective (first or third-person) in the data collected in the preceding studies. Across Study 1 and 2 results showed that EDA consistently rose at the beginning of the writing session, reached a plateau, and then rose again upon completing the writing task, irrespective of the writing topic or perspective. While the initial EDA increase seems related to the start of a demanding task, the post-writing increase might signal reward-seeking behavior upon task completion. Results of Study 3 confirmed that EDA increases in the beginning and upon writing completion are magnified by adopting a third-person perspective. These results show that expressive writing and self-distancing have measurable impacts on writers’ electrodermal activity.

There is much evidence that familiarity can affect perception of stimuli, with items that are familiar to the individual being preferred and better remembered. Previous research has also shown that familiarity with a typeface increases preference for it, but no studies have evaluated the impact of familiarity in relation to the affect towards handwritten text. For the present study, a two-part experiment (N = 422) was designed to measure how contemporary users of the Latin script perceive handwritten text. The first section was designed to collect specimens of the participants’ handwriting. The second, which was adapted to each participant’s handwriting style, measured implicit judgments of certain familiar letter shapes against unfamiliar ones. Results show that familiarity positively influences the extent to which one judges the friendliness and trustworthiness of handwritten text. Furthermore, the greater the similarity to how one writes a letterform, the greater the observed effect in terms of perceived friendliness. These findings suggest that people have an implicit bias towards handwriting that looks like their own.

Metacognitive reading awareness, involving cognitive process control and reading strategies, is linked to better comprehension and performance, but its relationship with intertextual integration strategies and the quality of argumentative essays remains unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the role of metacognition in employing integration strategies when reading conflicting texts. 69 undergraduate students participated in an online reading-writing activity, where they wrote argumentative essays based on conflicting texts about red meat consumption. We examined the students' use of intertextual integration strategies (refutation, weighing, synthesizing) and assessed their metacognitive awareness through their reflections on these strategies. The quality of the argumentative essays served as a measure of multiple text comprehension. The results indicated a lack of metacognitive awareness regarding integration strategies, with students overestimating their ability to employ these strategies. However, they demonstrated better understanding of refutational strategies based on the examples provided in their essays. Interestingly, students who were aware of and utilized these strategies in their essays performed better in the multiple-text comprehension task.

This study investigates the impact of peer orthographic revision using a self-reflection tool on orthographic performance in order to improve the understanding and applying of phonological, contextual and morphological rules in third-grade students. Children were assigned to one of three groups: two experimental groups (individual group, dyadic interaction group) and a control group. In the experimental training programme, a self-correction orthographic rubric was used, but while children in the individual group self-corrected the words, children in the dyadic interaction group did it in pairs and interacted in a way such that they should always reach an agreement on the correct spelling. The results showed that although both experimental groups decreased the number of misspellings in the post-test, the dyadic interaction group had the best results, differing significantly from the others, suggesting that self-correction strategies based on rubrics that explicitly display orthographical rules along with collaborative peer learning have a very positive impact on orthographic.

This paper investigated the impact of direct unfocused written corrective feedback (WCF) on EFL students’ writing improvement, self-efficacy, and anxiety. To this aim, 52 Iranian male learners were selected as participants by using the Oxford Placement Test and randomly placed in an experimental and a control group. The participants completed a pre-test that included a writing task, the writing self-efficacy questionnaire (WSEQ), and the Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) to assess their writing skill, writing self-efficacy, and writing anxiety, respectively. Having attended 15 sessions of writing instruction in which only the experimental group received WCF, the participants again completed a writing task, the WSEQ, and the SLWAI in the posttest procedure. The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in all three constructs, indicating that WCF has a positive impact on EFL students’ writing performance, self-efficacy, and anxiety. Implications of the study are presented.

Meta-analyses indicate that explicit writing instruction (EWI) is an effective method for improving student writing self-efficacy and writing performance. EWI relies on explicit instruction of writing strategies through modeling, scaffolding and self-regulation. Most EWI-based interventions have been conducted by researchers, generally with subgroups of students or on a one-on-one basis, and very few have been conducted in other languages than English. Our quasi-experimental study aims to address these limits by testing EWI’s effects when teachers themselves intervene using peer feedback during the writing of opinion letters. We used practice-based professional development to teach teachers how to use EWI, and compared two experimental conditions (EWI with and without peer feedback) to a control group (Business as Usual). A total of 483 French-speaking 5th grade students participated in the study. Results from repeated measure analyses showed that, with or without peer feedback, the EWI intervention produced better writing performance and higher self-efficacy compared to the control group. We discuss the role of EWI for writing performance and self-efficacy.

As project-based learning (PjBL) has become very popular in education over the past few years, this study conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis to synthesize the effectiveness of PjBL in EFL/ESL writing by examining 11 articles based on databases of Scopus and Google Scholar from 2013 to 2023. The result reveals that PjBL had a significant positive effect size in EFL/ESL writing. Moreover, the effect sizes of some moderating variables were analyzed, including educational levels, sample size, research design, intervention duration, and group size. It was found that the most important moderating variable that affects the effectiveness of PjBL in EFL/ESL writing is intervention duration. The significant overall effect of PjBL on ESL/EFL writing implies the need for educators to consider using PjBL in language teaching and learning. Meanwhile future researchers might consider applying other moderating variables such as research design, instructional strategies, and student characteristics, to identify the best practices for implementing PjBL in ESL/EFL writing.

In this design study, we designed an instructional unit open to contextual modifications with the aim of fostering secondary school students' philosophical writing. Three philosophy teachers developed innovative source-based writing tasks and provided discipline-specific writing strategy instruction in their 10th grade class. In this study, we focused on change. We explored teachers' interaction with the instructional design and studied teachers' views on how the intervention had changed their practice since a change of beliefs is crucial to successful, durable innovation of teaching. Moreover, we studied the effects of the changed practice, by exploring change in students' writing. An external jury analyzed students' texts to determine students' actual learning achievements. Teachers' insights into student progress were obtained from reflective interviews that featured comparisons between the observed and expected results. The results showed that teachers judged the design to be feasible, valid, and effective for students' philosophical writing development. After the intervention, students' texts showed similar or even more independent philosophical thinking than before, while the tasks became more complex. Implementation drove teachers to contemplate writing instruction, indicating a change in their belief system, which is necessary for genuine improvement in teacher practice.

This study aimed to delve into the under-explored domain of early handwriting performance among Arabic-speaking kindergarten children, focusing on the potential factors influencing early handwriting competency. The research encompassed 218 children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in Israel. The underlying skills assessed were divided into linguistic skills (phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge) and graphomotor and fine-motor skills. Hierarchical regression analyses were utilized to evaluate the contributions of these skills. Results indicated that, within the Arabic orthographic context, orthographic knowledge stood out as a paramount contributor to early handwriting performance, more so than phonological awareness. Furthermore, graphomotor and fine motor skills significantly influenced letter-copying speed and legibility, but not the accuracy of letter-writing to dictation. In conclusion, while orthographic knowledge is paramount, the importance of graphomotor and fine motor skills for early handwriting performance in Arabic cannot be understated. The study suggests that a focused approach to these skills can lead to more effective interventions and teaching methodologies tailored for Arabic-speaking kindergarteners.

Poor writing skills are problematic in today’s society where writing expertise is essential in personal, academic and professional contexts. Students struggle most with argumentative writing. To write a good argumentative text, students need genre knowledge on this type of text. After all, genre knowledge has been proven to be related to writing quality. Considering its relevance, in this study we investigated whether learning from (comparing) text exemplars could be an effective method to enhance genre knowledge. This study aims to investigate whether learning from (comparing) text exemplars can enhance genre knowledge. A quasi-experimental study with 77 11th grade students was carried out to test the effects of four conditions on genre knowledge of argumentative texts. Findings show that genre knowledge increases through single and analogue text examples. In addition, learning from comparing text exemplars does not seem to increase genre knowledge more than learning from single, sequential exemplars.

Writing processes constitute a complex interplay of planning, formulation and revision. Ideas take shape through the activation of previous knowledge and, when permitted, also its synthesis with information from sources that help to complement it and resolve doubts and shortcomings arising during writing. The possibility to use external help can be especially useful to those writing in a foreign language, and questions about the nature of the sources consulted can contribute new insights into language processing in the multilingual mind, as well as expand our notion of fluency. While leaving the target text is often considered a distraction, a ‘breakdown’ in fluency, it is, in fact, a part of language processing and text creation.       This article proposes a novel way to use keylogging data from Inputlog (Leijten and Van Waes 2013) to visualise the crosslinguistic nature of solving language and content problems in L3+ writing: creating process graphs to display the temporal dynamics of different types of sources used. The example data comes from a university-level course on Spanish linguistics, where Spanish was a third or subsequent language for the participants. Evidently, the vast majority of their external activity was language-related and brief, and, interestingly, a great part of it recurs to a lingua franca, English. Some social context and reasoning is offered to explain such an observation.

The book Writing and reading connections: Bridging research and practise, edited by Zoi A. Philippakos and Steve Graham (2023) is a collection of works concerning writing–reading relationships and suggestions for instructional practices that can support the synergetic development of writing and reading. The editors commence by pointing out that an instructional divide that promotes separate instruction of reading and writing exists. With this book, they argue that this divide is unfortunate and that bringing together writing and reading in research and in the classroom can yield positive effects.

Composing a well-written text is a prolonged and challenging process. The present study explored the incipient stages in descriptive texts written (pen and paper) or dictated by 283 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second to fifth grades. This study aims to better understand the interplay between age, literacy-related abilities, and descriptive text quality by exploring developmental aspects across grade levels regarding text structural quality, length of text and literacy related abilities, and by analyzing the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities (cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading), beyond length of text and grade level. Regarding the developmental aspects, the results indicate that text structure quality becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality descriptive text structure from third grade on in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. Length of text and literacy related abilities also increase with age. Regarding the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities, we found in 2nd grade, for P&P text, a significant total effect of syntactic lexical ability on text structure rank, partially mediated by length of text, and a weaker but still significant direct effect of syntactic lexical ability on TS rank, when controlling for length of text. We also found in 5th grade, for DICT text, a significant total effect of reading high ability on TS rank, not mediated by length of text.

Advanced technology has brought about great changes to language teaching and learning, such as significant shifts and requirements in the field of writing, which is considered as a complex ability to acquire, especially for second language (L2) learners (Hyland, 2021). Writing in this digital era has been shaped by various new technologies, resulting in more attention paid to technology use in L2 writing instruction and research. A new collection of papers titled Technology in second language writing: Advances in composing, translation, writing pedagogy and data-driven learning has been timely published to illustrate how the L2 writing field embraces the integration of technology in teaching and researching students with various cultural backgrounds. This fascinating book was edited by Jingjing Qin and Paul Stapleton who gathered scholars with different pedagogical experiences to provide a comprehensive detour from original research orientations to pedagogical applications.

This study examines associations between writing behaviors manifested by keystroke analytics and the formulation of argument elements in L2 undergraduate writers' writing processes. Ninety-nine persuasive essays written by L2 undergraduate writers were human annotated for Toulmin argument elements. The corresponding keystroke logs were segmented and analyzed to characterize the dynamics of writing processes for different categories of the elements. A multinomial mixed-effects logistic regression model was built to predict argument categories using the keystroke analytics. The study reported that L2 undergraduate writers' text production for final claims and primary claims featured P-bursts (execution processes delimited by pauses exceeding 2 seconds) of longer spans but lower production fluency compared to that for data. In addition, fewer revisions were observed when L2 writers were constructing final claims than when they were formulating data. These findings shed light on the varying cognitive loads and activities L2 undergraduate writers may experience when building different argument elements in written argumentation.

In the past years, comparative assessment approaches have gained ground as a viable method to assess text quality. Instead of providing absolute scores to a text as in holistic or analytic scoring methods, raters in comparative assessments rate text quality by comparing texts either to pre-selected benchmarks representing different levels of writing quality (i.e., benchmark rating method) or by a series of pairwise comparisons to other texts in the sample (i.e., comparative judgement; CJ). In the present study, text quality scores from the benchmarking method and CJ are compared in terms of their reliability, convergent validity and scoring distribution. Results show that benchmark ratings and CJ-ratings were highly consistent and converged to the same construct of text quality. However, the distribution of benchmark ratings showed a central tendency. It is discussed how both methods can be integrated and used such that writing can be assessed reliably, validly, but also efficiently in both writing research and practice.

This study explores the relation between writing quality and contextualization and elaboration moves, two kinds of textual expansion devices crucial for building common ground between writers and readers. We ask whether elaboration and contextualization features differentially predict writing quality and whether their quality contributions differ between genres. We also ask to what extent elaboration and contextualization are tied to individual writers, and can be explained by writer characteristics. To examine these issues, we annotated descriptive and argumentative texts of Dutch adolescents. Text quality was rated holistically, using benchmark scales.     As regards elaboration, depth affects quality more than breadth does. It also contributes across genres, whereas breadth only contributes in argumentations. Depth shows a large individual consistency across tasks, which is substantially related to students’ school type, grade and gender. Breadth shows weaker links to individual writers and their characteristics.     With regard to contextualization, opening and closing moves play a modest role in text quality. Initial support moves contribute to quality across tasks; concluding moves contribute more in argumentations. Concluding moves are most consistent within writers; however, for all contextualization moves, the writer variance is substantially explained by writer characteristics. This study opens up new avenues for explicating writing quality and writing skill.

One of the most common interests among cognitive psychologists is establishing ways to enhance human learning. An additional layer of complexity has been brought on by the rapid evolution of technology. Specifically, examining if the mechanisms involved in typing differ from those involved in handwriting. The literature concerning the implications of encoding modality on memory have been inconclusive. This present research examined whether encoding modality resulted in performance differences for word recall. Wammes et al.’s (2016) drawing versus handwriting methodology was utilized with the addition of a typing condition. The results replicated the drawing effect, whereby drawn words were better recalled than handwritten ones. Overall, the evidence did not suggest that the mechanisms involved in handwriting led to better free recall than those involved in typing. However, if the pen is indeed mightier than the keyboard (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014), then the effect is not explained by visual attention or sensorimotor action differences between modalities. Implications for education are discussed.

Academics are increasingly engaged in writing genres with purposes and for readers outside of academia—a variety of science-based communication practices that fall under the term science communication. These practices often span different modes, genres, and even languages, requiring high degrees of rhetorical flexibility, strategic knowledge, and regulation of writing. In this study, we probe the self-regulation and specifically the metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) of seven senior scientists who regularly and actively engage with writing for science communication. We argue that understanding their MSK can illuminate how strategic knowledge is transferred across written genres, and importantly offer useful insights for the training of future scientists. Using data derived from in-depth, narrative interviews with a recall component, we identify a variety of strategies for task conceptualization/analysis, planning and goal setting, monitoring, and evaluating the writing of different genres. Task analysis appears particularly crucial in science communication writing, due to the great variety of purposes and readers that fall under this umbrella. Interestingly, our participants underscore storytelling strategies, and seem to transfer language and style monitoring strategies to and from science communication and publication. We map the strategies identified and discuss the implications of our study for further research and science communication pedagogy.

Within the sociocultural theory of writing, texts are seen to result from cultural and social practices that affect the structure, content, and production of them in different knowledge communities. Accordingly, writing is not the same across subjects or contexts. Focusing on writing in subjects other than Language arts, this special contributes to understanding subject-specific writing involving both discipline specific knowledge, knowledge of representation, and production of knowledge in different, subject specific writing contexts. The issue advocates that disciplinary writing can start at an early age in primary school, that students have a range of preparedness for it, and that writing skills can be developed to support the learning objectives of the subject. The introduction considers the perspectives of writing to learn and learning to write as the underpinnings of writing across and in subjects. Consequently, the studies in the issue are related to these perspectives. The content areas scrutinized are Craft Education, Civics, Environmental studies, Science and Science orientation. This issue reflects the multifaceted, contextual, and hybrid forms writing can take, and, how writing can support learning in changing contexts and with different contents.