ABSTRACT
It is early in the semester and I am discussing techniques of conferring with individual writers with fifteen teachers enrolled in my graduate course, Teaching Basic Writ ing . I ’m advocating the use of writ ing conferences to help unskilled writers revise for fuller meaning. By encouraging writers to develop the latent and ill-formed content of their writing through asking questions designed to make the writer’s meaning more explicit, teachers can get writers to say more about what’s already been said, turn one paragraph into three, one page into four. This advice prompts a question from one of the teachers: Doesn’t this lead to many more errors to correct?
