To determine the relationship between handwriting speed and syntactic complexity, a study examined the syntactic features of 60 students enrolled in either a basic writing course or a traditional college composition course. Fast and slow handwriting were identified from highest scores on any one of four writing "tests." The writing…

Compares Spanish and English essays written by bilingual writers. Describes each writer's discourse-organizational and clausal-combining strategies. Suggests that organization on the discourse level is reflected in the type of clausal combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level. (TB)

Hypothesizing that students choosing their own topics would produce significantly more writing, a study examined the writing sample length of 42 sixth grade students who had been divided equally into two treatment groups. Treatments were counterbalanced so that during the first writing period students in one group wrote on topics they had selected…

To determine whether older students make more revisions in their essays, more kinds of revisions, or "bigger" revisions than younger students, a study was made of revisions made by 30 randomly selected seventh grade and 30 randomly selected eleventh grade students. Students were asked to write and revise twice essays in which they described a…

Good and poor explanatory essays of 40 college freshmen were analyzed for 18 cohesive ties and chains to determine the appropriateness of the cohesion system for teaching and evaluating writing. The questions that were specifically addressed were, (1) How do writers use the cohesive resources of the language? and (2) How is cohesion related to…

Investigates the effects of writing ability and mode of discourse on cognitive capacity engagement across three stages of the composing process, noting that writing ability differentially affected cognitive capacity engagement across discourse modes when using the secondary-task method. (HOD)

Eighteen fourth grade students and twenty sixth grade students participated in a study to determine if there was a significant difference in the quality of written composition among students exposed to the peer editing process as opposed to those exposed to teacher editing. The control group consisted of 8 fourth grade students and 10 sixth grade…

An extensive comparative analysis of dysfunctional sentences found in the writing of prefreshmen at Bowling Green State University (Ohio) was conducted to examine and to describe possible differences in dysfunctional sentences produced by remedial and nonremedial writers. Writing samples consisted of randomly selected freshman placement…

A study investigated the importance of sentence topic in written discourse. Training second language writers to identify sentence topics in drafts of their written work has been proposed as a central means of helping writers achieve greater coherence. The study explored the notion that "topic" is a psychological rather than linguistic concept, and…

Microresearch of the type performed by W. Loban and K. Hunt was used to describe two functions of macroresearch methodology--reporting and classifying--of the type conducted by J. Britton. This was done by contrasting the use of nine linguistic features of writing produced by four groups of students in each of the functions. The features were…

Compares the quality and syntactic complexity of 2 types of essays written by 44 college freshmen in a basic writing course. Essays dealing with group-phenomenon events (intensification) had more words per clause, but received lower quality scores than essays dealing with individually experienced events (initiation). (PAA)

To examine the differences and the unique qualities of third grade writers in relation to their uses of language and their perception of the world, a selection of writings from 20 third grade students was analyzed for language ability as measured by words per T-unit. Then, two students from the higher and two from the lower end of the scale were…

Differences between reporting and classificatory functions in writing were examined in the responses of grade 10 and grade 12 students: 60 who were successful English students, and 60 on the borderline of passing in each of the grades. The reporting tasks required students to write compositions describing their first day in a high school or some…

Using data consisting of descriptive and expressive-narrative essays written in 1969 and 1979 by black 17-year-old students in the stratified probability sample from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a study investigated which language patterns differentiated the NAEP essays written by black students in 1969 from those…

Forty-eight American (L1) and 48 Dutch students (L2), half of whom had computer science backgrounds and half of whom did not, were tested for their use of either scientific text (ST) syntactic structures or the less difficult common syntax when writing technical discourse (in Appendix). Results indicate that both L1 and L2 technical writers wrote…