A journal-based college composition program has been developed that links journal writing to the development of competence in more formal writing. Students write both free choice and assigned entries, and their entries become the basis of all the themes they write; in-class assignments focus on the improvement of specific aspects of the journal…

Sequenced writing assignments--a series of related writing tasks--offer students frequent opportunities to write and to acquire writing skills through redundancy, progressively more complicated cognitive and rhetorical demands, and a diversity of learning activities. The most frequently identified goal of sequencing is to move students beyond…

Seeking to involve students more actively in their writing assignments, two teachers developed a group of sequential writing assignments with an interdisciplinary emphasis for students in an advanced writing course. The goal of these writing assignments was to give students who had solved most of their mechanical writing problems a chance to…

Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both…

An 11-step process may be used by freshman composition students to help them write effective prose in a series of clear steps. The steps are: (1) select a topic (for the first assignment, usually a place about which students have strong feelings and vivid remembrances), (2) individually brainstorm the topic, (3) categorize the details that have…

Since engineering graduates and other technical students are frequently expected to document their projects as well as present such material orally, a Speech and Technical Writing course was designed at a New Hampshire college to prepare students for both technical writing tasks and oral presentations of their material. The course provides an…

Designed specifically for adult students in continuing studies, the sequence of core courses described in this paper reflects an interdisciplinary approach to humanities instruction that places the writing process within the broader context of critical thinking and liberal arts core instruction. The paper describes two course levels: the one entry…

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…