I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

An analysis of paragraph development in letters to the editor and in "Saturday Review and "English Journal articles suggests irrelevance of development methods taught in school. (RD)

Some suggestions as to how to transfer training from narration and description to exposition, and how to extend Christensen principles to deal with the whole composition. (Author)

This volume is intended for practicing and prospective teachers at the elementary level through the graduate level who are involved in helping others learn how to write. The 35 articles collected here are organized according to the following section headings: "Introduction,""Motivating Student Writing,""A Reluctant Medium: The Sentence,""The…

A study was undertaken to assess the effectiveness of a new rhetoric program of composition instruction for secondary school students. The lessons used in the program were designed to provide students with a step-by-step procedure for moving from a topic sentence to a unified, coherent paragraph. Using the primacy of the topic sentence, they led…

Reflecting the opinions of both classical theorists and recent authors, 16 papers on rhetorical theory are collected in this publication. Selections in Part 1, concerned with the definition and objectives of rhetoric, are by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Kenneth Burke, Donald C. Bryant, and Martin Steinmann, Jr. In Part 2, selections from the pedagogy…

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness with which composition skills could be taught by the traditional theme-assignment approach and by an experimental method using weekly multiple-choice composition tests in lieu of theme writing. The weekly tests were based on original but typical first-draft compositions and covered problems…

This collection of essays on literary composition sets forth rhetorical principles formulated from a close inductive study of contemporary American prose. The first essay develops a system of analyzing sentences by structural levels and outlines a generative rhetoric for the sentence consisting of the processes of "addition,""direction of…

The aim of this course for grades 10-12 is to develop in students their command of language through their use of it. It tries to guide the student through the actual process of composition, avoiding the treatment of the pre-writing stage and the writer's situation. The instruction material is divided into six categories (Conciseness and Clarity,…