An understanding of an author's structure of ideas assists readers in comprehending a text. Three kinds of writing activities relate to a reading comprehension subskill. (1) sequencing--the logical presentation of events, times, places, ideas or steps in a procedure to accomplish a task or to comprehend an event--for which a teaching progression…

An examination of student papers from three universities on the same tasks revealed that expository writing tasks were less demanding cognitively than argumentative writing tasks and that argumentative writing tasks were less demanding than speculative tasks. Another finding was that when students were able to translate a generalized task into…

This paper discusses strategies for teaching college composition, emphasizing "mechanical-meaningful-communicative" (M-M-C) sequencing. Under the M-M-C sequence, a student performs the following exercises: mechanical exercises, which build success in stimulus-response learning; meaningful exercises, which provide stimuli for problem-solving tasks;…

To learn correct grammar, developmental students must practice writing correctly. However, the traditional exercises offered in handbooks, workbooks, and textbooks not only fail to provide habituation in correctness, they actually provide practice in "wrongness." Instead of isolating individual problems, they promote confusion by linking them.…

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…