A teacher shares her technique for improving student writing: add detail. Forget organization, cutting, and adding more information. Get students to focus only on adding more detail to information already included. Examples are given. (MT)

Suggestions to help elementary educators teach students to use adjectives sparingly yet effectively include presenting and discussing definitions of adjectives from grammar books, incorporating models of adjective use from literature, explaining redundant adjective use, avoiding grammar exercises that require rewriting to add adjectives, and…

Recommends that teachers concentrate on explaining explicit procedures for revising style, because many novice writers interpret revision as only proofreading for typing or spelling errors. Provides a set of guidelines for stylistic revision that help students identify problems with passive verbs, nominalizations, wordiness and imprecise language.…

Elementary students can become good editors by using editing skills during the writing process. Teachers must present and repeat editing topics in minilessons, provide reminders of particular skills that were addressed, teach students to use editing resources, and expect students to develop proper usage gradually. (SM)

Describes a freshman composition assignment in which students create fictional figures and approach a final biography about the figure through a series of shorter essays. (HTH)

Indicates that using highlighters to mark errors produced a 76% class improvement in removing comma errors and a 95.5% improvement in removing apostrophe errors. Outlines two teaching procedures, to be followed before introducing this tool to the class, that enable students to remove errors at this effective rate. (JD)

Claims that writing logs constitute an effective teaching tool in basic college writing courses. Discusses one teacher's success using writing logs to assist the development of students' freewriting skills. Includes sample entries revealing students' comments and progress throughout the term and documenting the teacher's response to these…

Suggests using poetry's short short forms for a methodical and rapid series of writing assignments that emphasize both careful writing at the sentence level and overall planning and respect for form. (HTH)

Research from various fields supports the crucial relationship of speech and writing. Experience with the Story Workshop used in composition classes can show how thinking, speaking, listening, reading, writing, recalling, and immediate audience focus can be integrated into every phase of the writing process. Activities must enable students find…

Rather than giving basic writing students handbook and workbook exercises to direct their proofreading, teachers can use a monitoring system that teaches the students to recognize problems and to systematically monitor and eliminate the difficulties. After completing two or three assignments that include several drafts, students copy out all the…

Noting that effective writing requires organization, honesty, and personal experiences, this booklet offers suggestions for teaching students to write expository essays that are serious and truthful. The first section of the booklet suggests ways to teach students to organize their ideas, while the second section discusses both the value of…

The use of a Jonathan Schwartz essay as a prose model to teach writing lends itself appropriately to classroom discussions on various aspects of autobiography and general narrative design. Such use has proved to be particularly helpful with young writers because of its deceptively simple style and language and its use of a variety of sophisticated…

States that incorporating a short poetry or drama unit in a composition course can stimulate both students and teachers and that the benefits include more creative thinking, better attitudes toward writing and assignments, and sharpened revision skills. (EL)

Explains problems with teaching the research paper in stages and suggests an alternative, the cumulative research paper. (EL)

Describes how teachers can use the Bayeux Tapestry as the basis for writing games in many disciplines. Offers guidelines for conducting introductory lectures and preliminary investigations. Presents a series of writing games for the following disciplines: Art, Communications, English/Language Arts/Foreign Languages, History/Social Sciences, Home…