Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has brought into question how much ownership college students feel for “their” writing when it is AI-generated. This study recruited 88 college writers at one midwestern state university in the United States. In a within-subjects design, participants composed poems about a meaningful, challenging life experience, then prompted GenAI to compose a poem about that same event. Results showed significantly greater ownership for human-made poems; additionally, human-made poems were rated as more accurately reflective of selected lived experiences. Aesthetic merit, however, was rated higher for AI-generated poems for imagery, language, and form—but not for originality. Half the students preferred GenAI poems, mainly because of their textual features, while less than half preferred human poems, mainly for personal connections to the events presented. Implications for GenAI as a tool to support creative writing and meaningful literacy are explored.

Using case study methodology, this article analyzes the collaborative writing of three adolescent girls, one Latina and two Black, composing a group poem in an after-school spoken word poetry team. Drawing from literature on distributed cognition and embodiment, we found that participants utilized a system of writing techniques “on the page,” as well as a variety of embodied and social practices “off the page” in their team meetings to collaboratively compose this poem. We argue that focusing on the intersection of distributed cognition and embodiment in collaborative writing allows writing researchers to more fully attend to the collaborative sociality of all writing and allows teachers to support youth writers in recognizing and gaining collaborative writing skills for professional and creative writing contexts.

This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.

There is increasing usage of creative writing in the ESL/EFL classroom based on the argument that this pedagogy develops writer’s voice, emotional engagement, and ownership. Within the context of teaching poetry writing to second language learners, the current article develops a scientific approach to ways in which voice can be measured and then empirically explores the claim that voice is present within poetry written by second language learners. The study explored this question: Do second language poetry writers have a discernable voice in their written poetry? This issue was investigated in two different ways: (a) utilizing human reader ratings of the likelihood that two poems were written by the same poet and (b) using computational linguistic methodology to explore systematic differences in specific linguistic features in poetry written by second language poets. The data presented here show that poetry written by the same L2 writer is more readily recognized as such and that relevant linguistic items have patterns of frequency of usage that are different for different poets. Together the two studies provide a compelling case that voice is measureable and present in the poetry written by second language learners.

Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of the contexts of their literary works. This article argues for a balance of this image by laying out historical evidence on the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Literary journals, the Black press, literary writers, and literary societies, especially those of women, between 1830 and 1940 highly valued joint reading groups, creative writing efforts, and the role of literature in the lives of African Americans. Considerable work remains to restore accuracy and cross-class representation of African Americans in English studies, so as to resist tendencies to deny variation in the language habits and values of groups included in multicultural literature.

Ability to vary one's style is an important skill of mature writing, and it would be useful to have tests of this skill. We developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories. The style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloze sentences of less experienced students. Style differences, between experienced and inexperienced students, appeared in average sentence lengths, sentence types, and verb-adjective ratios. In another experiment, less experienced students were given explicit instructions to imitate story style; they showed virtually the same adaptability to style as the creative writing group in the first experiment. Thus we have evidence that the cloze test measures style differences between experienced and less experienced writers, and also that responsiveness to style features, distinct from the skill needed to change those features, is a significant component of experienced writing.