The English department at the University of Cincinnati recently initiated an experimental writing course for developmental students who used Apple IIc computers and the Bank Street Writer (BSW) word processing program. BSW was chosen because of its overall simplicity, efficiency, and accessibility. The first two weeks of the course consisted of…

A study was conducted to see if the use of word processing programs during composition instruction for basic writers would result in a larger quantity of writing and more global revision while writing. Subjects were 18 fifth, sixth, or seventh grade students who had been referred for remedial reading and writing instruction. They were assigned to…

Because students in remedial classes often become better readers without becoming better writers, a year-long experimental "change of focus" in a Title I remedial program attempted to close this gap by placing a greater emphasis on overcoming writing skill deficits than on overcoming reading skill deficits. To address teacher concerns…

Sketches the historical movement from orality to literacy that Walter J. Ong theorizes, applying it to basic writing instruction for open admissions students. Suggests that teachers first concentrate on narrative and rhetoric to develop writing about particularized details, saving sentence control exercises such as sentence combining for…

The Learning to Write Sentence by Sentence curriculum was developed at the College of Marin (California) to promote increased student awareness of quality in communication by providing concentrated exercise in writing. This self-paced course forces the student to think before writing, by using rhetorical and complicated instructions on how to…

This study was undertaken to determine whether an oral-aural approach to remedial composition instruction for college students would be superior to the traditional grammar and rhetoric approach. For one semester, four classes of remedial writing at Jefferson College in Missouri served as experimental groups in which ideas and sound were stressed…

One of the most difficult problems facing colleges today is dealing with students whose basic skills are too low to allow them to benefit from college-level studies. While some institutions seem to have given up expectations for underprepared students' achievement, others have instituted massive programs of individualized counseling and tutoring…

This guide provides materials for teaching a writing remediation class in the intermediate grades. Sections of this guide include: (1) background information for teachers about the writing process; (2) teaching units containing activities and games on selection of writing topics, organization of the elements in a paragraph, development of ideas,…