Thesis (M.A.)--Western Kentucky University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-83).

This inquiry project explores connections between mind and body in academic writing. What scholars, educators and researchers have noted about the inclusion of the body in academic study illuminates the challenges of understanding the relationship between the two. Using a framework shaped by embodiment and feminist criticality illuminates how the body is elided through schooling and educational systems, reaching a peak in higher education. An interdisciplinary review of the literature supports a broad consideration of embodiment and typical writing practices in academic settings. To better understand the body as a source of knowledge, data construction is holistic, using an embodied methodology with women who reenter graduate school later in life. Mindful awareness of the body guides the relating of writing experiences, and methods are designed with an ethic of care for participants, a spirit of co-creation, and shared experience. A narrative approach to data is used to explore where and how embodiment appears in women’s stories about academic writing. The research process reflects a time of social separation within a pandemic. By better understanding women’s embodied experiences, this project seeks to enrich and enliven the way institutions of graduate study understand writing as an embodied practice and to honor what the body knows alongside the mind.

This comparative case study examines how writing teachers comment on basic writing students' papers, how students respond to these comments, and how students take risks in their revising process. Four U.S., four ESOL basic writing students, and four basic writing teachers participated in the study. Three writing samples of the students' choices including drafts, revisions, and final papers were collected, coded, and analyzed to see the amount of risk-taking. Students were asked to complete the Daly and Miller's Writing Apprehension Test along with a Demographic Information Check Sheet. Each student was interviewed three times: once for each writing sample, and each teacher was interviewed once. The study revealed that students in the study appreciated teachers' written comments on their multiple-draft papers, and that teachers' comments, particularly the ones on content and organization, did help improve their writing ability and motivated these students to take risks in trying new ideas in revision. The ESOL writers tend to take fewer risks and regard revision as making lexical changes because of their unfamiliarity with the English usage and writing conventions, while the U.S. writers take more risks and view revision as a recursive process with different levels of attention.The main purpose of the study was to find out what major factors motivated students' risk-taking in their revisions so that writing teachers will be able to provide comments that motivate students to become better writers. This study will contribute to the understanding of what students really think of teachers' written comments. / Department of English