The debate surrounding how best to support African American student writers continues today as the gap between achievement scores persists. This qualitative analysis documents the classroom structures and instructional practices of two English Language Arts teachers working in a predominately African American public middle school, whose students…

A study of the results of a New Brunswick (Canada) evaluation of writing in grades five, eight, and eleven revealed that teacher-evaluators were more influenced by the length of compositions and their freedom from simple mechanical errors than by students' control of syntax. (DD)

Describes a pilot study that employed the cloze technique to assess student writing and to investigate writing generally. (DD)

Impromtu pre- and post-test essays by 302 students randomly selected from over 80 sections of a first-semester freshman composition course revealed significant improvement. (DD)

Reports that students who were provided between-draft teacher evaluation showed a greater degree of change, higher fluency, and greater differences in support of ideas on final drafts than students employing guided self-evaluation forms and students receiving no evaluation. (DD)

Tentative conclusions were that controlled sentence practice and sentence combining can increase the overall writing effectiveness and syntactic maturity of college students in a single semester. (DD)

Studied how college students altered their syntax when they received direct instruction in sentence combining. (DD)

Examines the relationships among an audience analysis task, the number of arguments and appeals used in college students' persuasive papers, the level of strategic adaptation of those arguments, and overall persuasiveness. Finds that giving students information about the audience relative to their paper topics significantly affects each of the…

Findings indicate some evidence of the adult basic writer's reliance on the oral repertoire when communicating in the written mode. (DD)

Examines whether accelerated college writing courses are an effective alternative to regular courses in developing writing skills. Finds that accelerated courses were less effective than the regular courses with respect to writing attitudes and percentages of student essays judged competent. (PRA)

Reports some of the findings about the problems of adult writers taken from a survey of 254 top-level and mid-level managers. (HOD)

Concludes that remedial writers' writing processes are shorter and of poorer quality than those of traditional writers, and that what separates the groups is the ability to reflect on what is being written. (DD)

Reports on a study that examined the effect of intended audience and mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth- and tenth-graders, and that attempted to determine whether there were increases in syntactic complexity from grade 6 to grade 10 for each audience and in each mode. (DD)

Reports on the predrafting processes of several high and several low writing apprehensive students engaged in academic writing and analyzes the differences related to writing apprehension. (HOD)

Analyzes the composing processes of three children, aged two to four, as they composed with a responsible adult in a group setting. (HOD)