Curated Writing Research Resource: 17 Categories and Counting

Jenell Krishnan and Jiali Wang

In this blog, we highlight the WRITE Center's website research page. This resource was created to support writing researchers, educators, teaching scholars, graduate students, and others who are interested in the study of writing.  The page organizes writing-related research articles into 17 categories. In what follows, we provide a brief description of each category and how these resources might be used by different folks who visit the page.

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1. Digital and multimodal writing: As technology becomes a crucial part of the information society, multimodal writing has gained popularity. This section features work that focuses on digital writing and multimodal writing.

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2. Argumentative writing: As a genre that is highly valued in school, contexts and beyond, this section features evidence-based practices for teaching argumentative writing.

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3. Academic language: In this section, we feature work that focuses on academic language, the importance of academic language, and how to enhance students' academic language effectively.

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4. Writing instruction: This section features a range of instructional practices and their effects on classroom learning.

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5. Writing models: This section recognizes the complexity of writing and and the different lens for studying writing development. 

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6. Writing Assessment: How do we effectively assess students' writing skills from various aspects? What influences students' performance in assessments? How can teachers support students using formative assessments? A range of topics on writing assessment are featured in this section.

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7. Writing in middle school: In this section, you will find work that focuses on writing instruction, assessment, and development of various types of learners from middle school contexts.

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8.Writing in High School: In this section, you will find work that focuses on writing instruction, assessment, and development of various types of learners from high school contexts.

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9. Writing and exceptional learners: In this section, we feature studies on exceptional learners. How might we differentiate instruction for our exceptional learners? 

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10. Writing motivation: What role does writing motivation play in learning to write? How do we enhance students' writing motivation? These are essential questions that are addressed in many of the articles featured here.

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11: Writing Intervention: In this section, a large number of writing interventions offer evidence-based approaches to writing instruction, assessment, and beyond. ​

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12: Writing Development: How does writing develop over time? Work showcased here is grounded by this overarching question.

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13.Writing and Multilingual Students: Multilingual students have additional language, cognitive, and cultural resources to draw on in writing. But how can writing instruction support the writing challenges they may face? Work featured here addresses this question.

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14: Disciplinary literacy: Reading and writing in different disciplines also look differently because each discipline has its own set of problems to solve and uses a unique set of methods to reach the goal. This section includes work that supports our understanding of disciplinary literacy.

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15. Critical literacy: How do we empower our students as critical readers and writers? This section offers work on critical literacy, a learning approach where students examine texts to understand the relationship between language and power.

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16. Quantitative Text Analysis: With the development of quantitative text analysis tools, we have access to automatically generated indices related to writing. But how should we interpret these indices? In which ways are they helpful tools? This section explores work that focuses on quantitative text analysis.

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17. Writing and Englishes: How do we empowers our students to embrace their many Englishes? What friction points exist between our students' Englishes and the writing expectations in our education systems? This section explores these issues and more. 
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Who might be interested in this page?

Researchers

These resources are a curated list of writing-related studies for researchers who are actively studying writing research, planning to study writing, and/or looking to learn more about writing. The 17 categories may help researchers focus on the topic they are studying.

​PLEASE NOTE: This resource page is emerging in its development. Please contact us with your recommendations for additional writing-related categories, researchers, and/or articles ([email protected]).

​We look forward to building this resource page with your support!

Teachers

ELA and history/social studies teachers might find this page particularly useful for:

• becoming familiar with evidence-based writing practices
• expanding ideas for what is possible for writing instruction
• understanding the theory and/or concepts behind writing development
• learning about different perspective on writing (i.e., critical literacy, disciplinary literacy)                                                                                                                               

Students

This page is also especially helpful for undergraduate students, graduate students, and other students who are interested in reviewing literature that focuses on writing. How better can we support you through this page? 

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Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here. ​