A definition of teaching is offered. Several hypotheses concerning the nature of the writing process and the factors effecting this process are discussed. The need for research on unexamined aspects of written composition is indicated. (BN)

Both in standard factors of syntactic maturity and in measures of overall writing quality, first year college students trained in sentence combining achieved significantly higher scores than students following a conventional curriculum. (DD)

The treatment group of college freshmen, which worked with the Strong-Christensen sentence-combining materials during an intensive six-week period, scored significantly higher on two factors of syntactic maturity than the control group. (DD)

Demonstrated effectiveness in eliciting growth in number of words per T-unit through the use of sentence-combining exercises in a college composition course and related frequency of embedding errors to data on length of T-unit. (DD)

Three studies suggest that students involved in observational activities increase the level of specificity in their writing after only 10 to 15 days of instruction and are judged to be more creative. (DD)

An investigation into the context for writing in two college chemical engineering classes revealed that the two courses represented distinct communities where different issues were addressed, different lines of reasoning used, different writer and audience roles assumed, and different social purposes served by writing. Copies of assignments are…

Examines effects of three writing tasks on students' writing, writing processes, and later understanding of short stories. Results indicate that personal analytic and formal analytic writing were associated with significantly higher posttest scores on literature than restricted writing in the form of short answer questions. (SRT)