C. Connor Syrewicz

University at Albany, State University of New York | UAlbany · Department of English

Which knowledge and skills would help creative writing students to improve their writing? Writing is a complicated activity that involves the mingling of a great number of social, cognitive, behavioural, environmental, and bodily factors, and an incredible number of these factors have been shown to affect the writing process. One cognitive factor w...

What knowledge and skills will help our students to improve the way in which they perform the activity of creative writing? In the fields of composition studies and educational psychology, one way of answering this question has been to study the ways in which expert writers perform the activity of writing. In this paper, I review some of the litera...

In this paper, I argue that writing tasks (assignments, exercises, prompts, activities, etc.) are one of the best tools we have to teach our students how to perform the activity of writing more effectively. Contemporary creative writing instructors tend to be suspicious of writing tasks, and I argue that this suspicion is a largely result of the pr...

In this paper, I argue that it would be pedagogically useful to investigate the psychological processes which lead readers to like and dislike texts, and I offer an initial set of hypotheses on the pleasures of reading which can be gleaned from Roland Barthes’s short monograph, The Pleasure of the Text. I begin by briefly addressing the origins of...