Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

Supports a reader oriented theory of paragraph writing. Discusses the readers' expectations of paragraphs and supporting research, demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the most popular current model of paragraph structure, demonstrates the power of rhetorical paragraph writing, and details the pedagogical implications of the…

Argues that although textbooks emphasize the importance of attention-getting introductions, such devices are hard to explain and hard for students to recognize. Observes that such an emphasis may suggest to students a vastly oversimplified view of the reading process. (HOD)

The standard organizational features of an essay (title, introduction, main body, and conclusion), together with their specific functions, constitute an established but neglected convention that enables students to write conventional essays and to appreciate the uses of variation in essay form. (HOD)

The authors contend that because sentence-combining exercises provide students with disciplined writing practice without the sometimes paralyzing pressure to be "creative," they are probably the most basic and useful means of preparing students for writing original compositions. Presented is a sentence-combining exercise. (KC)

Even at an early age, children are guided by their intuitions as they write. Intuitions are the culmination of perceptions that have been internalized and synthesized into patterns. Furthermore, they take time to develop. Consequently, if systematic instruction is to play a part in the formation of intuitions about written language then it must…

This article states that advanced composition skills must provide students with means of becoming independent writers, able to monitor their own writing and to know the means to solve problems of effective written communication. (Author/CFM)

Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

A heuristic procedure can be used to teach organizational skills to students of technical writing. Designed to allow students on their own to explore ways that numbers can be used to give a definite shape to technical information, its central feature is a matrix composed of a series of control numbers (horizontal axis) and organizing concerns…

Paragraph writing mediated by imagery is richer, more flexible, and more creative than that produced by the somewhat impoverished, predictable, one-process model usually taught in composition classes. Since the writing advice given students differs considerably from the practice of professional writers, students should be given exercises that not…

James Joyce's use of interior monologue (the interior self of the character is given directly, as though the reader were overhearing an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling flowing through the character's mind) can help basic writers in developmental classes. Students can be given excerpts from Joyce and asked to turn the sentence…

To show the shortcomings of concentrating on the teaching of sentences and paragraphs in basic writing courses, this paper points out problems encountered by one teacher who attempted to use that approach. The paper describes how the teacher discovered that teaching the rules and concepts of grammar and writing stifles students' creativity,…

Because junior high school literature anthologies contain few expository offerings and English texts seldom involve students in critical reading as background for writing, it is up to the teacher to fill the gap. One approach for providing students with critical reading practice is the cloze procedure, which (1) encourages close reading and…