Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.
The Elements of Style is a style guide to writing American English, published in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled." Writer and editor E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the so-called Strunk & White, which Time recognized in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.
Collaborative writing is a procedure in which two or more persons work together to create a written document or content. This writing tool takes many different forms, including but not limited to academic papers, reports, creative writing, projects, and business proposals. Success in collaborative writing involves a division of labor, unique insights, and most importantly writing techniques. Oftentimes through a shared document, collaborators add edits, provide feedback, and record changes. Collaborative writing is often used in professional as well as educational settings, utilizing the expertise of those involved in the collaboration process.
Copy editing is the process of revising written material ("copy") to improve quality and readability, as well as ensuring that a text is free of errors in grammar, style and accuracy. The Chicago Manual of Style states that manuscript editing encompasses "simple mechanical corrections through sentence-level interventions to substantial remedial work on literary style and clarity, disorganized passages, baggy prose, muddled tables and figures, and the like ". In the context of print publication, copy editing is done before typesetting and again before proofreading. Outside traditional book and journal publishing, the term "copy editing" is used more broadly, and is sometimes referred to as proofreading; the term sometimes encompasses additional tasks.
Free writing is traditionally regarded as a prewriting technique practiced in academic environments, in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics, sometimes working from a specific prompt provided by a teacher. While free writing often produces raw, or even unusable material, it can help writers overcome writing blocks and build confidence by allowing them to practice text-production phases of the writing process without the fear of censure. Some writers even use the technique to collect initial thoughts and ideas on a topic, often as a preliminary to formal writing.
An outline, also called a hierarchical outline, is a list arranged to show hierarchical relationships and is a type of tree structure. An outline is used to present the main points or topics (terms) of a given subject. Each item in an outline may be divided into additional sub-items. If an organizational level in an outline is to be sub-divided, it shall have at least two subcategories, although one subcategory is acceptable on the third and fourth levels, as advised by major style manuals in current use. An outline may be used as a drafting tool of a document, or as a summary of the content of a document or of the knowledge in an entire field. It is not to be confused with the general context of the term "outline", which a summary or overview of a subject, presented verbally or written in prose. The outlines described in this article are lists, and come in several varieties.
Donald Morison Murray was an American journalist and English professor. He wrote for many journals, authored several books on the art of writing and teaching, and served as writing coach for several national newspapers. After writing multiple editorials about changes in American military policy for the Boston Herald, he won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. For 20 years, he wrote the Boston Globe's "Over 60" column, eventually renamed "Now And Then". He taught at the University of New Hampshire for 26 years.
A writing process describes a sequence of physical and mental actions that people take as they produce any kind of text. These actions nearly universally involve tools for physical or digital inscription: e.g., chisels, pencils, brushes, chalk, dyes, keyboards, touchscreens, etc.; these tools all have particular affordances that shape writers' processes. Writing processes are highly individuated and task-specific; they often involve other kinds of activities that are not usually thought of as writing per se.
Peter Elbow is a professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also directed the Writing Program from 1996 until 2000. He writes about theory, practice, and pedagogy, and has authored several books and papers. He is one of the pioneers of freewriting.
A foreign language writing aid is a computer program or any other instrument that assists a non-native language user in writing decently in their target language. Assistive operations can be classified into two categories: on-the-fly prompts and post-writing checks. Assisted aspects of writing include: lexical, syntactic, lexical semantic and idiomatic expression transfer, etc. Different types of foreign language writing aids include automated proofreading applications, text corpora, dictionaries, translation aids and orthography aids.
David John Bartholomae was an American scholar in composition studies. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 1975 and was a Professor of English and former Chair of the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research interests are in composition, literacy, and pedagogy, and his work engages scholarship in rhetoric and in American literature/American Studies. His articles and essays have appeared in publications such as PMLA, Critical Quarterly, and College Composition and Communication.
The process theory of composition is a field of composition studies that focuses on writing as a process rather than a product. Based on Janet Emig's breakdown of the writing process, the process is centered on the idea that students determine the content of the course by exploring the craft of writing using their own interests, language, techniques, voice, and freedom, and where students learn what people respond to and what they don't. Classroom activities often include peer work where students themselves are teaching, reviewing, brainstorming, and editing.
Employee monitoring is the surveillance of workers' activity. Organizations engage in employee monitoring for different reasons such as to track performance, to avoid legal liability, to protect trade secrets, and to address other security concerns. This practice may impact employee satisfaction due to its impact on the employee's privacy. Among organizations, the extent and methods of employee monitoring differ.
Peer critique, a specialized form of critique, is the common practice of writers reviewing and providing constructive criticism of each other's work before that work is turned in for credit or professional review. Writers in many genres and professions including fiction writers and technical writers use some form of peer critique as part of their process of writing. It is also commonly used as an instructional technique in school writing settings. Peer critique may also be referred to as peer review, writing groups, writing circles, or writing workshop.
Peer feedback is a practice where feedback is given by one student to another. Peer feedback provides students opportunities to learn from each other. After students finish a writing assignment but before the assignment is handed in to the instructor for a grade, the students have to work together to check each other's work and give comments to the peer partner. Comments from peers are called as peer feedback. Peer feedback can be in the form of corrections, opinions, suggestions, or ideas to each other. Ideally, peer feedback is a two-way process in which one cooperates with the other.
Text annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note or gloss to a text, which may include highlights or underlining, comments, footnotes, tags, and links. Text annotations can include notes written for a reader's private purposes, as well as shared annotations written for the purposes of collaborative writing and editing, commentary, or social reading and sharing. In some fields, text annotation is comparable to metadata insofar as it is added post hoc and provides information about a text without fundamentally altering that original text. Text annotations are sometimes referred to as marginalia, though some reserve this term specifically for hand-written notes made in the margins of books or manuscripts. Annotations have been found to be useful and help to develop knowledge of English literature.
Revision is a process in writing of rearranging, adding, or removing paragraphs, sentences, or words. Writers may revise their writing after a draft is complete or during the composing process. Revision involves many of the strategies known generally as editing but also can entail larger conceptual shifts of purpose and audience as well as content. Within the writing process, revision comes once one has written a draft to work with, so that one can re-see and improve it, iteratively. Working at both deeper and more surface levels a writer can increase the power of the text.
Theories of rhetoric and composition pedagogy encompass a wide range of interdisciplinary fields centered on the instruction of writing. Noteworthy to the discipline is the influence of classical Ancient Greece and its treatment of rhetoric as a persuasive tool. Derived from the Greek work for public speaking, rhetoric's original concern dealt primarily with the spoken word. In the treatise Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies five Canons of the field of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Since its inception in the spoken word, theories of rhetoric and composition have focused primarily on writing
Inputlog is one of the most used keyloggers. It enables researchers to observe the online writing process unobtrusively. It logs every input action that is used to produce a text, viz. keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks and speech input via Dragon Naturally Speaking (Nuance). The program also provides a timestamp and detailed information about the Windows environment that is activated. Researchers can download the program from the Inputlog website for free.
Writing assessment refers to an area of study that contains theories and practices that guide the evaluation of a writer's performance or potential through a writing task. Writing assessment can be considered a combination of scholarship from composition studies and measurement theory within educational assessment. Writing assessment can also refer to the technologies and practices used to evaluate student writing and learning. An important consequence of writing assessment is that the type and manner of assessment may impact writing instruction, with consequences for the character and quality of that instruction.
Eckstein, Grant, Jessica Chariton, Robb Mark McCollum. (2011). Multi-draft composing: An iterative model for academic argument writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10.3, 162-172.
