Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford conclude "Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study," a discussion of their research project exploring patterns of formal grammar and usage error in first-year writing, with an invitation to "conduct a local version of this study." The author was eager to accept their invitation; learning and…

Addresses past and current issues concerning teacher response to first-year student writing and suggests that teacher intervention should be viewed as a writing process itself. Describes the author's own process of responding to student writing, which he has found to be very effective. Concludes that individual teachers must decide for themselves…

Reviews over 50 textbooks grouped into three categories: (1) workbooks; (2) sentence style books, most of which use sentence combining as the fundamental type of exercise; and (3) copy books, which are used by directly copying passages with signals for particular changes. (EL)