Drawing on socio-cultural theory, this paper focuses on children's classroom-based collaborative creative writing. The central aim of the reported research was to contribute to our understanding of young children's creativity, and describe ways in which peer collaboration can resource, stimulate and enhance classroom-based creative writing…

Argues that, in understanding creativity and the process of composing, it is helpful to think in terms of the metaphysical concept and while polar opposites appear to be contradictory, they are part of the same whole. Suggests some polarities that help in understanding the creative process in writing. (TJ)

The inhibiting effect of being conscious of the physical process of writing on the intuitive process of writing is discussed. (HTH)

What pushes a writer over the edge of thought into text production--over what may be called "the writing threshold?" This is the moment when the thoughts in a writer's mind, the writing situation, and personal motivations create a momentum that results in a pattern of written words. There is evidence that not everyone crosses the writing…

Tests were given to a nine-year-old boy to establish the constraints operating when he was writing poetry. The tests involved writing cloze tests on poems by poet Ted Hughes and on a poem the boy had written a year earlier. The boy was also asked to write a poem and then to discuss what he was thinking as he wrote. The following constraints were…

Although contemporary psychologists generally acknowledge the significance of affect in human experience, few have attempted to understand its role in cognitive processes. The same can be said of writing specialists. In fact, New Criticism, so long dominant in American literary thinking, still continues to influence the emotions writers disclose…

Presents results of an informal study indicating that (1) external contingencies that force writing productivity regardless of mood seem to facilitate rather than impede the appearance of creative ideas for writing, and (2) productivity precedes creativity. (HTH)

Using data collected from 44 college faculty members, a study investigated the personality characteristics of writers, the ways in which highly productive writers differ from less productive ones, differences in writing strategies, and underlying motivations to write. The subjects were all male, tenured faculty members of a midwestern university…

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that recent theories connecting creative problem solving with cerebral specialization might explain why some writers compose much more effectively than others. Specifically, the experiment was designed to find ways composition teachers can help students to transform writer-based prose into…

Proposes that teachers use their own writing as a teaching tool. Discusses both the left-brain logical, rational approach and the right-brain intuitive approach to invention and states that in composing their own methods and materials, instructors can stress both patterns of creativity by illustrating how each complements the other. (EL)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) reasoning strategies used by gifted and average fifth grade children in written discourse; (2) the effect of mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of…