Professional speakers often use simple mental recipes to organize impromptu talks. The author taught these recipes to his high school composition students and used a timed trial format to give them practice in rapidly outlining their thoughts on a given topic. Thirteen of these recipes are provided. (SJL)

The author lists and discusses nine patterns of errors that students in an inner city secondary English class exhibited during a six week writing skills development session. (Author/RK)

The prewriting strategies of guided imagery, brainstorming, clustering, freewriting, and oral activities, are described. It is suggested that teachers utilize these strategies to help students become competent in each stage of the writing process. Ten writing resources are listed. (MBR)

Advantages of peer evaluation of writing are outlined, questions that arise once instructors decide to use this method are presented, and steps to develop students' awareness of what to look for and what to say about the writing of peers in English composition and other disciplines are discussed. (MBR)

The authors contend that because sentence-combining exercises provide students with disciplined writing practice without the sometimes paralyzing pressure to be "creative," they are probably the most basic and useful means of preparing students for writing original compositions. Presented is a sentence-combining exercise. (KC)

Proposes use of criteria-based scales, which prescribe levels of writing performance for a particular mode of discourse, as a way to teach and test student writing skills. Pre- and posttesting, teaching for the test utilizing the criteria-based scale, and why this method is successful are also discussed. (MBR)