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Professional Writing - Screnwriting, Novel Writing, Fiction, Feature Writing, Business Writing, Writing for ChildrenOur taster sessions give students the chance to develop and build on the knowledge and understanding of a particular writing form. It's also an opportunity for you to develop the independent practice skills crucial to a professional writer and an opportunity to develop writing industry contacts. All MA Professional Writing students spend time exploring different forms of writing before deciding which area they wish to specialise. Specialisms might be in the field of Business Writing, Features Writing, Non-Fiction, the Novel, Writing for Children or Scriptwriting. So this is your opportunity to explore and experiment with different areas of writing to see which one suits you best. Within these taster sessions, you will be invited to initiate, negotiate and complete an extended piece of writing to high standards. You will also develop a report that should demonstrate an enhanced understanding of the market context for your work as well as an appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses. Your development as a writer through these sessions will be supported by your peers. Your support will come in the form of online discussions, peer-to-peer feedback and by your own personal reflection on the feedback you receive on your work and your market research. To get the most from this experience, students are expected to participate in a schedule of peer-to-peer reviews. We have created assignment forums for you to post your work - this is where you receive feedback from your peers as well as critique the work of others. Please note that these taster sessions are taken from our part-time distance learning course. The audio lectures may contain instances of tutors speaking directly to our distance learning students.
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INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN DOMAIN-SPECIFIC BELIEFS ABOUT WRITING, WRITING SELF-EFFICACY, WRITING APPREHENSION, AND WRITING PERFORMANCE IN UNDERGRADUATESWriting has been called the "neglected `R'" in the traditional trilogy of reading, `riting, and `rithmetic (National Commission on Writing, 2003). Writing performance continues to languish, despite societal expectations that students should be able to write clearly and precisely. Sociocognitive theory predicts that writing beliefs are related to writing performance. Much research has focused on writing self-efficacy beliefs and their link to writing apprehension and writing performance, while research exploring another type of belief, domain-specific beliefs about writing itself, is sparse. This study examined the relations between these beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension, and their links to writing performance. This research was a three-phase study. Phases I and II involved instrument construction and validation, while Phase III examined the relations among the research variables. Two hundred eighty-seven Hispanic women students completed a test battery in class measuring demographics, beliefs about writing, writing self-efficacy, and writing apprehension. Writing performance was measured separately on an authentic writing task, a take-home paper, by both an overall grade and six component grades. Inter-rater agreements on these grades ranged from r = .83 to .91. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that beliefs about writing independently predicted writing performance and that some beliefs about writing (e.g., Good writers adapt their message to their readers) are adaptive and associated with strong writing performance, while other beliefs about writing (e.g., Readers are impressed by big words) are maladaptive and relate to weak writing performance. In addition, apprehension about making grammatical and other mechanical errors had a stronger negative effect on writing performance than the more traditional concept of writing apprehension, which concerns sharing one's writing with others and having it critiqued. After controlling for domain-specific beliefs, writing self-efficacy weakly predicted writing performance as well. These results support the need for future research examining the relations among the research variables and writing performance in samples that are more balanced with respect to gender and ethnicity, and with other writing tasks. Because beliefs about writing demonstrated the largest beta weights in the regression equations, these beliefs may have the most promise for promoting both writing research and practice.
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I Would Teach It If I Knew How: Inquiry, Modeling, Shared Writing, Collaborative Writing, and Independent Writing (IMSCI), a Model for Increasing Secondary Teacher Self-Efficacy in Integrating Writing Instruction in the Content AreasFramed in theories of pragmatism, self-efficacy, and ecology, this design-based research study attempted to make explicit connections between theory and field-based research. The pedagogical goal of this study was to expose in-service teachers to a scaffolded model of professional development for writing (IMSCI) that could be implemented in their own teaching. This model of professional development also served to place research participants in a professional learning community. Teachers worked in focus groups made of another teacher in their own discipline, and a collective focus group, and worked through the steps of the scaffolded model in consideration of their own writing instruction in an effort to increase their self-efficacy, while also experiencing a participatory approach to instruction that in turn improved their ability to enact this instruction in their own classrooms. The data, which included focus group interviews, blog posts by the teachers, and member checking, were analyzed using constant comparative methods. The analyses indicated that the majority of these content teachers had not experienced effective writing instruction models as students and did not learn how to teach writing in their preservice teaching programs. Additionally, their professional learning experiences as inservice teachers had not given them the tools they needed to overcome ecological factors that stopped them from teaching writing. Teachers' responses about their experience with the IMSCI model indicate that it has the potential to help teachers understand what effective writing instruction looks like, how to implement it in their own classrooms, and to increase their perceived self-efficacy as teachers of writing.