Textbook assertions about the use and placement of topic sentences are contradicted by analyses of professionally-written prose. (JH)

Extralexical information, that is, those semantic properties evoked by words which are not usually accommodated in lexicons of any kind, is essential for the comprehension of numerous ordinary sentences in a natural language. A brief review of studies on forms of extralexical information shows that those works do not deal with: (1) questions of…

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

Presents and discusses a descriptive paragraph useful for teaching composition students how rhetorical fragments work in writing and why sentence fragments do not. (HTH)

Revised version of a paper presented to the Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 1972. (DD)

Research conducted under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. (DD)

Bororo is an unclassified language spoken in central Mato Grosso, Brazil. Field work done under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; paper written with the partial support of the National Science Foundation. (RS)

Proposes a formula for helping students learn to write paragraphs by requiring highly disciplined and limited material and sentences until students have acquired skills that permit more variety. (TJ)

The "controlling statement," a method of teaching students to write in an organized and efficient manner, consists of three basic parts: the idea, the viewpoint, and the key terms. Once introduced to students, these three parts can be easily used throughout the year (or years) to refer to basic areas within the composition process. This method of…

The study investigated the use of repeated writings as a means of increasing written language fluency with 48 learning disabled students in senior high school resource room English classes. Subjects received one of four treatments for 4 days: repeated writing with structural cues, repeated revision with structural cues, writing on a new topic with…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

THIS PAPER DEALS WITH SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF RHETORICAL FORM AND STRUCTURE. THE SUGGESTION IS MADE THAT THE FIRST CONSIDERATION IS A DEFINITION OF THE ENTITY--THE EFFECTIVE STIMULUS--TO WHICH THE S (SUBJECT) RESPONDS. THIS MEANS A SPECIFICATION OF FUNCTIONAL CONTEXT, IN WHICH THE S VIEWS A GIVEN LANGUAGE PERFORMANCE. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL…

THIS IS THE REPORT OF A COMMITTEE WHICH IDENTIFIED FIVE STUDIES WHICH IN ITS OPINION WERE SOUNDLY BASED UPON CONTROLLED EXPERIMENTATION AND TEXTUAL ANALYSIS. THE FIVE STUDIES ARE BRIEFLY SUMMARIZED AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF EACH FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF TEACHING ENGLISH COMPOSITION ARE PRESENTED. (JK)

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…