Almost 30 Years of Writing Research: Making Sense of it All with The Wrath of Khan

Abstract

In this invited article, we present an ongoing research program in the area of writing. Although this program has focused on students with learning disabilities (LD) and other struggling writers, it has also concentrated more broadly on issues involving writing development and general writing instruction. One purpose of this review was to share our basic findings in each of these areas, as they have important implications for teaching writing to students with LD. Another purpose was to illustrate how an ongoing research program develops and grows over time. To make this process more concrete, we employed several different literacy devices, including drawing an analogy between the development of our research program and the development of the story line for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan . Our final purpose was to describe the research we plan to do in the near future.