What Inquiring Writers Need to Know

Abstract

One of the most powerful ways to help students improve their writing involves them in working with specific data, in activities that require using some of the basic skills or strategies necessary to conducting a good inquiry in almost any field: observing carefully, transferring sensory detail into effective language, comparing data to develop generalizations and explanations, and so forth. In virtually every composing situation, students need far more than syntactic fluency and knowledge of form. Most composing tasks require at least some of the skills of inquiry. Even the task of writing a composition on I was scared, one of the thousand topics for composition published by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English (Moore 1971), requires more than selecting an appropriate experience and arranging details into dramatic episodes to maximize their impact. In addition, writers must recall salient detail and render it into