The two essays in this booklet reflect the spirit and ideas of Francis Christensen, specifically his exhortations to composition teachers, illustrated by his own practice, to approach the teaching of writing inductively, to look always to the writing of professionals for models, and to behave as scholars. The first essay, on sentence modelling,…

The article describes a secondary-level curriculum for written expression based on a linguistic model. Directed toward learning disabled adolescents, the method teaches sentence and paragraph construction based on verbal and written models presented by the teacher. Writing good sentences, paragraphs, and essays is presented as a logical extension…

The experimental program in remedial composition described in this interim report was designed on the assumption that students could best learn to write minimally acceptable compositions by imitating paragraph and essay models which have been divided into a series of incremental steps. The objectives of the program were to develop a heuristic…