A college freshman level sentence-combining treatment consisting of one paragraph rewriting exercise for 12 consecutive weeks resulted in significant gains in average words per clause and words per T-unit. (HOD)

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)

A 1979 analysis of student expository writing showed that holistic quality scores awarded by teacher-raters were influenced to a greater extent by essay length and freedom from spelling errors. A replication of that investigation using a sample of students' narrative writing produced the same findings. (HOD)

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)

Describes children's views of the contexts surrounding their writing and examines five contextual factors: ownership, setting, audience, purpose, and genre.

Reports on the development of a home intervention strategy at the secondary school level to improve students' writing abilities. (HOD)

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)

The experimental evidence on the value of a sentence-combining approach to improving reading comprehension is still sparse, but the possibilities seem rich.

Describes the development of a domain-referenced system intended to both describe and classify current writing assignments and to create composition assignments. (HOD)

To determine the effects of oral sentence-structure exercises upon student writing, a 1-year experiment was conducted with two randomly matched fourth-grade classes of approximately equal size, one control class and one experimental class. The experimental group regularly completed exercises designed to teach students to produce sentences…

Examines the relationship between cohesion and coherence in children's writing. Finds evidence of a relationship between cohesion and coherence, and reports that this relationship (1) varies according to text content; (2) does not vary according to quality of writing; and (3) does not vary according to the students' grade level. (KEH)

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)