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 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.

The effects of writing format (handwritten (HW) versus word processor (WP)) were examined in a sample of college students with and without learning disabilities (LD). All students wrote two essays, one in each format, scored for quality and length. Groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, mathematical calculation, writing fluency, essay length or essay quality. The "interaction hypothesis" was not supported, in that the use of a word processor as a writing accommodation did not provide a differential boost to students with LD. Both groups produced longer essays in the WP versus HW condition. The best predictor of essay quality was essay length regardless of writing format. Most students in each group preferred the WP format. Interestingly, a smaller percentage of students in the LD group (72%) than NLD group (91%) used the available time for writing. Keywords: accommodations, learning disabilities, college students, writing, word processor

This study examined the role of word-level reading proficiency and verbal working memory in grade 4 and 5 students’ (N = 42; 23 boys) performance on a curriculum-based measure of narrative writing. Two outcomes were measured: correct minus incorrect word sequences (CMIWS; accurate-production of spelling and grammar in-text), and composition quality. CMIWS scores were moderately correlated with the holistic quality score. Word reading proficiency predicted CMIWS above and beyond the variance accounted for by gender, grade, handwriting automaticity, and working memory. Word reading proficiency also predicted composition quality controlling for gender and handwriting automaticity. Working memory, as measured by an updating task, was not a significant unique predictor of CMIWS or composition quality. Grade (5 > 4) and gender differences (girls > boys) were also found for CMIWS scores. Although handwriting automaticity was correlated with CMIWS scores and writing quality, it was not a unique predictor of either measure. The results provide further evidence of the sensitivity of the CMIWS index. They also highlight the importance of considering reading proficiency and handwriting automaticity when assessing children’s writing abilities and planning instruction for children with writing difficulties. Keywords: written expression; curriculum-based measures; reading; handwriting; gender

This paper examines a unique reflective writing assignment used in an undergraduate social work course on human sexuality. We ask what new understandings reflective writing mediates (Vygotsky, 1978) regarding sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender relations—oft-neglected topics within pre-professional academic programs. One goal for this assignment was to mediate future social workers' abilities to differentiate between thoughts and feelings, and we evaluate the degree to which students did so in their writing. By adapting Hatton and Smith's (1994) framework for analyzing reflective writing, we also distinguish between descriptive and dialogical reflection, identifying and analyzing examples of both within the students' writing. Findings suggest that students engaged primarily in descriptive reflection, but also engaged in some dialogical reflection. We argue that both are useful but that the latter mediates deeper and more useful learning. We present recommendations for enhancing reflective writing assignment design in pre-professional academic programs.

In this introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Writing Research, we review four decades of research, bringing writing to the forefront in conversations devoted to gender and literacy. We identify the impetus for much of the research on gender and writing and situate the four articles in this special issue within three themes: gender patterns in what and how students write, cognitive and socio-cultural factors influencing gender differences in student writing, and attempts to provide alternatives to stereotypical gender patterns in student writing. These interdisciplinary themes, further developed within the four articles, underscore the need to consider gender as a complex social, cognitive and linguistic characteristic of both reading and writing.

Girls are more likely to outperform boys in the development of writing skills. This study considered gender differences in language and working memory skills as a possible explanation for the differential rates of progress. Sixty-seven children (31 males and 36 females) (M age 57.30 months) participated. Qualitative differences in writing progress were examined using a writing assessment scale from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). Quantitative measures of writing: number of words, diversity of words, number of phrases/sentences and grammatical complexity of the phrases/sentences were also analysed. The children were also assessed on tasks measuring their language production and comprehension skills and the visuo-spatial, phonological, and central executive components of working memory. The results indicated that the boys were more likely to perform significantly less well than the girls on all measures of writing except the grammatical complexity of sentences. Initially, no significant differences were found on any of the measures of language ability. Further, no significant differences were found between the genders on the capacity and efficiency of their working memory functioning. However, hierarchical regressions revealed that the individual differences in gender and language ability, more specifically spoken language comprehension, predicted performance on the EYFSP writing scale. This finding accords well with the literature that suggests that language skills can mediate the variance in boys' and girls' writing ability.

This paper focuses on the ways girls use digital environments, like Word, PowerPoint and chatting programmes, for writing and communication purposes. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and by adopting a critical discourse framework, we will explore the relationship between girls and new media, especially the ones related to digital writing, in terms of three interconnected variables. The first one is related to the role of the two most important socialisation institutions, home and school, at the present historical juncture, characterised by intense mobility and an expansion of traditional forms of literacy. The strategic choices of the girls’ families and their schools’ teaching practices contributed significantly to the formulation of their digital writing practices. The second variable is gender. Our data clearly show that a substantial number of girls were more inclined than their male peers to use word-processing and presentation software, performing, thus, the school discourses of ‘diligent students’. The third key variable concerns the personality of the girls who filtered in their own unique ways their social experiences, overcame limitations, took initiatives and appropriated technologically-mediated writing media for personally meaningful ends that enhanced their school and/or entertainment Discourses.

This study attempts to integrate a gender perspective in the research of children's conceptions about learning to write. We analyzed the individual interviews of 160 schoolchildren - equally distributed between boys and girls - in the eight grades from kindergarten to seventh grade in elementary school in Argentina, in order to explore gender-related patterns in their conceptions of learning to write. The lexicometric method was applied to the transcriptions of children's responses. Subsequent qualitative analysis of modal responses revealed distinctive gender differences regarding both the content and the form of responses. We describe and interpret such differences within a theoretical framework that distinguishes two different modes of discourse and thought: the gendered conversational styles studied by Tannen, and the two modes of cognitive functioning proposed by Bruner. Results show that boys tended to adopt a report talk style and to present traits that are close to those proposed by Bruner in his portrait of the logico-paradigmatic mode of thought. Girls, instead, tended to adopt a rapport talk style and to integrate to a greater extent a set of procedures characterizing a narrative modality, by speaking at length of human actions, intentions and feelings. These findings underscore the educational potential of considering gender as an important (and still unexplored) aspect that influences children's(and most probably teachers') conceptions of how one learns.

This article maps the diverse theoretical disciplines that inform writing research and in particular, how these disciplines have researched the relationship between writing and gender. This is presented against the background of a changing theoretical landscape in research in gender. In particular, it will consider the paradigm shift from discourses of difference and disadvantage to discourses of diversity. Research on writing has not always acknowledged this changing lens, and gender research rarely focuses on writing. The aim therefore is to map out these different approaches, explore how they have impacted writing classrooms and to add to the call for a reconfiguring of gender in writing research as a complex and diverse category rather than as a fixed and essential characteristic we each possess.

Writing can be a tool for communicating and learning in content area subjects. This pretest-posttest quasi-experiment examined the effects of instruction in a content area writing framework on students' text quality and ability to use writing to learn. It also examined the effects of possible moderator variables (gender, previous writing achievement) and mediator variables (genre knowledge, approach to writing). A multilevel analysis was conducted with students nested within classes. Instruction significantly increased argument genre knowledge and explanation text quality, but not argument text quality, explanation genre knowledge, or learning during writing. Gender predicted previous writing achievement and posttest argument text quality, but did not interact significantly with instruction. Previous writing achievement strongly affected several posttest measures, but did not interact significantly with instruction. A path analysis supported the theory that instruction affects genre knowledge, which affects text quality, which predicts learning during writing.