The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire…

The aim of this study is to investigate issues of Indonesian EFL students' writing skills, covering ability, problem and reason why they got problems in writing comparison and contrast essay. The convergent parallel of mixed methods was used to explore these issues by involving 52 EFL students of IAIN Samarinda who enrolled the academic essay…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

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."

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

Suggests that using Francis Christensen's method of analyzing paragraphs can help students improve their own paragraph development. (TJ)

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)

A humorous satire suggesting techniques for paragraph composition. (RD)

Summarizes a method for teaching composition that allows for practice in straight composition, the opportunity for self-expression, and the getting of feedback by asking students to write a paragraph in response to a specific question about the text for the week and a second paragraph of reaction to the text. (TJ)

Describes a simple structuring device for teaching paragraphing skills which focuses the student's attention on the subject of the paragraph and a specific interest in the subject. Outlines how to use the method for showing basic writers how to proceed to longer compositions. (HB)

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)

Describes a method for teaching students in college composition courses how to construct a paragraph. (RB)

Today's paragraph is not a logical unity, and we should stop telling our students that it is. (DD)

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…