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xxiii INTRODUCTION Following the Thread Rigor is not a four-letter word. —Barbara R. Blackburn □ Forty-eight years since the first New Jersey Writing Project (NJWP) Writing Insti- tute at Rutgers University, New Jersey, thirty-nine years since the first New Jersey Writing Project in Texas (NJWPT) Writing Institute in Region XIV, Texas, thirty-three years of training trainers, thirty-three years of conducting NJWPT/Abydos Literacy Learning Conferences, and twenty-six years of writing and researching Acts of Teaching: How to Teach Writing have given us an interesting perspective on the teaching of writing. Over these years, we have trained thousands of teachers who, in turn, have taught hundreds of thousands of students. We have advised hundreds of administrators who, in turn, have advised hundreds of thousands of teachers. We have met resistance from some, outright hostility from others, but in the main, most have been eager to have students learn to write in authentic ways that will serve them well, not only on tests, but in the ever-ex- panding yet ever-contracting world we all call home. Our philosophy has never faltered. Writing is a process, plain and simple. Trying to short-circuit that process through formulas, gimmicks, or activities not based on research but dreamed up by quasi-consultants, always results in failure—if not immedi- ately, sometime or somewhere down the road. Remember our parable about Heather, the young ingénue who, at her tender age, already knew the great truth about writing—that writing is a process, not a worksheet. Children must write regularly to become writers, must enter into a relationship with pen and paper (or keyboard), and must find joy in the struggle to put thoughts into words and sentences. With hard work on the part of knowledgeable teachers, these children even fall in love with the process of writing. Students must know, deep in their minds, the power of the written word. Teachers and administrators must support the acquisition of that knowledge. Once the partnership among students, teachers, administrators, and writing is achieved, the results are stunning, almost unbelievable. But make no mistake—partnerships come with challenges and require commitments. That honeymoon phase when ideas flow freely is at once complicated by curriculum standards and accountability measures. But the struggle, like quarrels maturing partnerships create, can be rewarding. Writing can be the most prized intellectual activity in which we engage. Think about it: to write, we must take thought, which is abstract and ephemeral and therefore fleeting, and capture and encode it into a highly intricate and compli- cated symbolic system of letters and combination of letters, which we call writing, so that our audience can decode it and get the same thoughts and understandings as we. If that isn’t intellectually challenging, higher-level thinking, then we don’t know what