A survey of attitudes of students in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) toward writing was analyzed in terms of total population and in terms of ability subgroups established by a diagnostic examination of writing ability. Results were compared with results from a similar survey of the 1974-1975 CGSC class, which was analyzed…

The purpose of this investigation was to measure the effect of simulation-gaming on the expository prose competence of community college remedial English composition students. Thirteen teacher volunteers were used. The design was fully crossed so that each teacher taught an equal number of the 25 experimental and 25 control course sections. The…

Two control classes and two experimental classes of first-semester college freshmen participated in this study, which examined the effect of expressive writing on attitudes toward writing in general. Both groups were taught the same content material and wrote the same number of papers. In addition, the experimental group did expressive writing in…

This study compared three instructional approaches used in freshman composition courses: a writing-practice approach, a rhetorical technique approach, and a traditional grammar approach. An interview, classroom observations, and a questionnaire were used to analyze the instructional approaches of ten instructors. Two paragraphs on assigned topics…

Recording, narrative, exposition, and argument were hypothesized to present writing tasks of increasing cognitive and verbal complexity. This was investigated by obtaining writing samples in each mode from a stratified sample of 128 Australian sixteen year olds. The cognitive-complexity hypothesis was supported by data concerning the relative…

The hypothesis of this study was that a method of writing instruction that employs expository organizational models to be imitated by students is more effective in improving expository writing organization than conventional classroom instruction in writing. One pre-test and one post-test writing sample were taken from two groups of English 10A…

The purposes of the basic rhetorically-focused writing module presented in this document are to aid classroom instruction and to furnish a model of ideas and simplified techniques for developing other writing modules. Contents of this document are an introduction, a discussion of the journal as a writing form, an outline overview of the model, and…

This study considers the effects of ability, attitude, and pressure on army writing. A survey questionnaire was designed on the basis of a review of the literature on causes of organizational writing problems; this was administered to 168 army officers attending the Army Command and General Staff College. An entire class at the Command and General…

In order to determine whether the use of two types of teacher written responses to student essays--clarifying and directive--produced significant differences in writing performance growth, 28 12th grade students in a metropolitan Nebraska high school were randomly divided into two groups. Each group received one of the two types of teacher…

Thirty fifth-grade children participated in a study of regressions in oral reading of narrative and expository material. A cloze test, a retelling task, and a comprehending task were administered to each student. Analysis of regressions in reading indicated nine categories of cause of regression: correction, anticipatory problems, intonation…

Traditional and self-paced methods of teaching college freshman composition were compared in this study of pretest and posttest essays written by selected freshman English composition classes. The 96 pretests and posttests obtained were rated analytically for unity, organization, development, style, and mechanics. Analysis of covariance indicated…

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the reading of narrative and expository materials were studied in a sample of 47 eighth-grade students. Informal Reading Inventories were developed from narrative and expository materials in use in the students' school, as were longer narrative and expository passages for miscue analysis. Passages were…

The purpose of this project was to initiate a classroom journal-writing program that would provide children with an opportunity to express themselves freely, and that would offer useful information for improving relationships within the classroom. Both students and teacher kept daily journals for a year. Four simple rules governed the procedure,…