Teachers and students can use color to identify different types of writing. This article describes using color to highlight annotations, identity, topic sentences, thoughts and emotions, logical arguments, advertising and selling, showing and telling, and looking and seeing. Includes sample assignments for identifying emotional content, topic…

Discusses how the development of critical thinking skills is inhibited in many students because they under-conceptualize the context in which controversy occurs. Suggests ways to raise students' awareness of being involved in a continuing debate, such as using written dialogue as a basis for extending a writing assignment that combines exposition,…

Textual grammar provides a means of examining the relationship between the sentence and the text as a whole, and it is in that context that the problems of learning a second language become clear and that it becomes important for the teacher to understand how the text functions so as to impart it to students. (MSE)

Ethical issues make writing assignments more than academic exercises, especially when the ethical issues involve the writing itself. Such issues arise in every aim and mode of discourse and in every stage of the writing process, from choosing a topic to editing the final draft. Informative discourse must be factual and comprehensive, and have…

Applies three major points of American pragmatism to the development of technical writing assignments: (1) restricting the writing environment to the practical, workaday world, (2) emphasizing the complex contexts of purpose and audience, and (3) verifying the effectiveness of any piece of writing by its intentions. Offers criteria by which both…

To gain a sense of good rhetorical structure, what students of writing in English as a second language need to do is not to practice writing paragraphs and essays conforming to particular patterns, but rather to recognize and understand the resources available for indicating relationships between the propositions that make up their own, unique…

A principal cause of the seeming "foreignness" in the compositions of English as a second language (ESL) university students is discussed, and an approach to correcting the problem is suggested. It is asserted that the English language compositions of ESL students reflect native language rhetorical norms which are culturally based. Discourse bloc…

Eleven brief items providing a range of activities and exercises to help students master the elements of coherence in text and to foster both comprehension and production are presented. (MSE)

Offers rules and comments for using discourse analysis to teach student writers how to convert incoherent compositions into coherent, cohesive prose. (RL)

Examines three basic approaches for teaching argument in a composition class--logical/analytic, content/problem solving, and rhetorical/generative. Discusses the problems of each and defends the rhetorical/generative approach as the one that reaches its goal most directly and most reliably. (HTH)

Following an introduction by James Britton, this book discusses the attitudes and values giving rise to effective writing instruction. The seven chapters examine the following topics: (1) achieving a philosophical perspective on composing through awareness of how writers actually work; (2) assumptions underlying classical rhetoric; (3) writing as…

Studies in 1974 and 1984 of errors in the writing of Australian university freshmen in a history course found no significant differences between the two groups. The most salient elements in the error-prone writing were less related to writing mechanics than to constitution of meaning, suggesting that grammar instruction is inadequate to improve…

A research project investigated the relationship between cognitive development in college students and their rhetorical maturity. Viewing the problem of audience in composition instruction in terms of cognitive development reveals that it may not be enough to tell students that they must consider audience if they do not have the cognitive maturity…

A study compared the influences of rhetorical and sentence-level features on holistic essay scores assigned by raters who are experienced writing instructors but not trained in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. In scoring six university-level essays, these raters placed emphasis on ESL sentence-level errors far more than on essays'…

A grid system designed to help students and other writers exploit familiar forms of discourse for better thinking and composing is outlined. The technique helps link topic and discourse form innovatively, promotes understanding of the contextual character of every writing task, and can encourage students to read in order to master writing…