Suggests the value to modern students of paraphrasing and describes exercises in paraphrasing. (DD)

Describes the use of "Harper's" magazine "Index" column of statistical facts as an essay prompt in freshman composition classes. Lists specific instructions for the writing assignment. Reports that students generally produce impressive, sophisticated, thoughtful, and well-written essays for this exercise. (SG)

Recommends a series of questions, activities, and guidelines to make free writing more productive and generative. (MS)

Presents a simple classroom exercise that transforms a remote future need for grammatical competence into a more practical, immediate, and useful skill. (HTH)

Argues that students can be made more aware of language used in the "real" world by introducing them to figures of speech. (MS)

Proposes that a systematic program of summary writing may be particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism by requiring them to focus objectively on someone else's ideas. Describes a program of summary assignments that foster dialectic thinking. (HTH)

Describes a practical freshman composition writing assignment in which students composed career profiles of notable alumni, which were subsequently used by the college career planning and placement office. A sample letter and profile are included. (HTH)

Argues that journal writing expands students' discoveries about themselves as writers, and extends their abilities to take charge of writing assignments in both English and non-English courses. (MS)

Describes writing assignments that help students make the transition from concrete to formal operations. The assignments confront the writers with an idea or piece of experience, ask them to respond to it and how they arrived at this response, and what other responses could be made by them or by someone else. (HTH)

Describes a freshman composition assignment in which students create fictional figures and approach a final biography about the figure through a series of shorter essays. (HTH)

Proposes as a follow-up to an article on controlled composition for basic writers a necessary bridge between strict copying and independent composing. (HTH)

Proposes combining peer-response exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book "Sharing and Responding" with the series of written peer critiques in Kenneth Bruffee's "A Short Course in Writing." Argues that these types of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom, capturing the struggle between individual expression…

Describes how a "strip story" activity (reassembling a text from strips of paper containing the text's sentences) develops reciprocity, the interaction between reading and writing as the reader negotiates a text and the writer assists the process. (MM)

Presents an exercise for teachers which illustrates the limitations of workbook drills and rule study by teaching a brief hypothetical grammar text of five rules and exceptions, then employing those rules in standard drill exercises and a writing assignment. Claims that traditional pedagogies of formal grammar are not effective in improving…

Describes an approach to composition instruction in which the students are given a body of real or fictional evidence about a particular case and asked to interpret or explain it by means of a closely-reasoned argument. (HTH)