Applies Burke's dramatistic pentad to the stages of the writing process. (DD)

Presents a procedural model for use as a prewriting strategy to help students "decenter" or distance themselves from their writing and avoid the generalities that characterize egocentric writing. The model provides opposing viewpoints in a student's analysis of problems or issues. (HTH)

Describes a procedure technical writing students can use to test how concerns like segmentation, defining criteria, and paragraph structure may apply to finding an organization for their own texts. Essentially a heuristic, the procedure assumes that a number like three (a control number) is useful in organizing information for any kind of…

Describes an incremental approach to writing research papers designed to promote students' commitment and audience awareness. (MM)

Recommends a 15-step cut-and-staple method that helps students improve their writing while learning to manipulate parts of their work in the revision stage of the writing process. Offers secondary suggestions in addition to the 15 steps. (RL)

Describes method in which students write a draft requiring some writing skill before learning about that skill. Concludes that predrafting (1) enforces first-drafting; (2) shows students their natural writing abilities; (3) emphasizes discovery of substance first, rules and form second; (4) promotes an active student role; (5) arranges learning in…

Discusses how film offers a vehicle for observation and imitation, providing writers with a more accurate image of how they perform. Refers to three films: "Before the First Word", "Telling an Old Story", and "Pieces of a Puzzle" that have become the basis for insightful and fruitful discussions about writing. (JK)

Uses a broad definition of technical writing (practical writing) as a backdrop for two freshman composition courses. Introduces a student planning sheet for "thinking in"--examining the audience and purpose of a writing assignment. (RL)

Uses a single language system--technical description--to illustrate how language systems can now be used as the basis for instruction in technical writing. Provides sample exercises in progressive teaching from simple description to complex continuity devices, showing how they can be used at all stages of the writing process. (HTH)

Describes a teacher's presentation in the classroom of the drafts, notes, outlines, and other artifacts from his own papers. Recommends that teachers show their students evidence of their own struggle with the writing process in order to encourage them and convince them that all writers hesitatingly begin with a mess. (JG)

Discusses 11 specific activities that teachers can emphasize as part of the revision process, including altering form, organizing material, creating transition, deleting material, expanding information, emphasizing ideas, subordinating ideas, creating immediacy, improving syntactic structure, improving language use, and cleaning up. (RL)

Guides to assist students in evaluating and revising or rewriting their written works are presented and discussed. (HTH)

Encourages teachers to view writing as a process creating meaning, enabling the writer to come to grips with complex experience. (DD)

Urges writing teachers to encourage revision and peer reading of drafts of papers so that students will know the processes writers go through to meet the requirements of the strangers who read what they write. (DD)

Discusses how computer programing and expository writing are both based on the ability to (1) recognize that a complex whole is composed of manageable parts, and (2) identify the necessary steps for achieving a goal or supporting a generality, and (3) concentrate on and summarize a large amount of information into an abbreviated, succinct…