Describes writing assignments in which students develop paragraphs incorporating various sense images. (RL)

The editor of "English Quarterly" interviews Frank O'Hare about his work on sentence combining, his views about writing instruction and writing research, and about his own writing. (RL)

A practicum used an integrated writing approach to improve 28 third-graders' ability to write descriptive paragraphs. The program consisted of two strategies: a process approach and a step-by-step approach. Success was measured by comparing the statistics of a pretest and a posttest and through observation, computer generated worksheets, and…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: LEVEL: High school and college. AUTHOR'S COMMENT: I used this mini-unit to initiate the class in working effectively as a peer group. Moreover, the task I assigned demands that students develop an awareness of their audience's needs by providing an immediate and concrete response. THE APPROACH: (1)…

Sentence combining can act as a corrective for the large number of language arts lessons and activities that emphasize errors. Based on familiar sentence patterns, sentence combining provides models of effective language use and encourages students to examine and try more expressive and interesting styles of speaking and writing. Sentence…

In asserting that cohesion both exists in a superordinate relationship to unity and emphasis and must be considered a part of the surface structure of written language as well as the deep structure, this text provides a commentary on the paragraph as the basic unit of written language and an analysis of the structure underlying paragraph…

Helping students understand coherence in terms of the lexical ties and semantic relations possible between clauses and sentences formalizes an area of writing instruction that has been somewhat vague before and makes the process of creating a coherent paragraph less mysterious. Many students do not have the intuitive knowledge base for absorbing…

Algebraic equations and geometric forms are useful in teaching and learning composition. Algebraic equations can illustrate the modular nature of paragraph structures and can be refined by students to describe types of paragraphs. Discussion of the "slippery" nature of words and their power of transformation can be a lecture topic as the class…

A study of 94 students was undertaken in an attempt to support the hypothesis that remedial English instruction in college can result in measurable improvement in student writing. These students, chosen randomly from 376 prospective remedial students were divided into seven different writing classes which met for one-hour class sessions four days…

When students inductively study linguistic patterns and then apply their understanding to achieve sentence variety, their interest in composition is heightened and their writing styles improve. Through examples in music and in nonsense and model sentences, students became aware of their language's basic structural patterns (subject-verb word…

Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

A method called "Objectives-Art," by which disadvantaged students in a community college can be taught to structure paragraphs, is described. Works of art are intended to be a stimulus to the student's sense of unity between form and content, and the objectives are aimed at transferring the student's perception of form and unity into a process…

Suggests using visual cues such as boldface type, indenting, and color coding to help students identify important words in sentences and relationships between sentences. (MKM)

Offers a four-step procedure that can be used to help upper elementary school students learn to write a well-structured expository paragraph. Suggests that the writing experience is a bridge to understanding more difficult text structure. (FL)

Warns against the overuse of cohesive conjunctions in writing and recommends that teachers instruct students on contextual use of conjunctions rather than on their random use. (CRH)