In this article, the author shares her observations as a member of the City Writers, a community-based fiction-writers' workshop that is not affiliated with any universities or any organizations in the state of Illinois. The group was started with a small grant from the state's arts council, but City Writers no longer receives any form of public…

This article presents a profile of Juanita Havill, who has been writing children's books for nearly 30 years. For this author, each story is a problem to be unraveled in a way that is true to the human heart. What do you do if you have cheated on a test and you feel awful about it? What is your life like if you are a gentle individualist but your…

Lynne Rae Perkins is the author of "Criss Cross," which won the Newbery Medal, the nation's most prestigious prize for children's book. Perkins grew up in Cheswick, PA, near Pittsburgh, majored in printmaking at Penn State, and attended grad school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She moved to Leelanau County, MI, in 1987 with her…

In this paper, two beginning qualitative researchers describe the challenges and successes of conducting a collaborative self-study. For two academic years, the authors wrote and analyzed personal narratives related to their experiences as a lesbian and a gay man, respectively, in educational contexts. This article addresses the data analysis…

Painters, musicians, and writers--among others--often begin as novices by modeling the practices of their best teachers or favorite masters. The purpose of this article is to suggest that the habits of working, published writers can serve students as informal models for how processes happen behind the scene of public work. Students can examine…

Despite his considerable influence on the development of ESP and all our professional lives, almost nothing has been written about John Swales' distinctive prose style. Based on a 340,000 word corpus comprising 14 single-authored papers and most chapters from his three main books, this paper sets out to identify the main features of this style.…

This article presents an interview with Emily Toth, who writes the monthly "Ms. Mentor" academic advice column in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" and teaches in the English department at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. She is the author of "Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia" (1997), "Inside Peyton Place: The Life…

Articles published in three leading North American higher education journals during the year 2000 are compared with those published in three leading, English language, non-North American higher education journals (and with a larger sample of fourteen such journals). The comparison focuses on the location of their authors, the themes researched,…

This article talks about how two American authors of Latin-Caribbean descent, Esmeralda Santiago and Julia Alvarez, inscribe their native language into the discourse of American literature, contributing to a more diverse picture of what American culture is. Thus Alvarez's and Santiago's texts not only renegotiate ethnic immigrant experiences of…

This article features the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award and its award-winning books for beginning readers. The award-giving body was established in 2004 by the Association of Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, to honor the most distinguished contribution to the body of American children's literature known as…

In this article, the author relates how a lost dog gave her the idea for writing her book, "How to Steal a Dog." Her tale of serendipity began when she, a dog-lover, walked into a garden center near her home and saw a sign for a lost dog taped beside the cash register. She states that, although her story is about a girl who stole a dog and…

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers, but few studies have examined the ways that small acts of reformulation and exemplification help contribute to this. Abstraction, theorisation and interpretation need to be woven into a text which makes sense to a particular community…

In this discussion, the author highlights the relationship between language and identity by discussing notions such as language as a symbolic resource (Heller, 1995) and language as a badge of identity (Buruma, 2003) in a society. The reasons why a number of bilingual writers have decided to write in their second languages are explored, and issues…

Biography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of…

Identifying the approach used by those revision experts par excellence--that is, professional editors--should enable researchers to better grasp the revision process. To further explore this hypothesis, the author conducted research among professional editors, six of whom she filmed as they engaged in their practice. An analysis of their work…