Both in standard factors of syntactic maturity and in measures of overall writing quality, first year college students trained in sentence combining achieved significantly higher scores than students following a conventional curriculum. (DD)

The treatment group of college freshmen, which worked with the Strong-Christensen sentence-combining materials during an intensive six-week period, scored significantly higher on two factors of syntactic maturity than the control group. (DD)

This book contends that systematic oral and written exercises enable students to overcome many difficulties encountered in writing English. The first chapter is a general discussion of the teaching of composition today. The second section describes an experiment in oral composition drills in a seventh-grade class. The third section describes the…

Demonstrated effectiveness in eliciting growth in number of words per T-unit through the use of sentence-combining exercises in a college composition course and related frequency of embedding errors to data on length of T-unit. (DD)

Three studies suggest that students involved in observational activities increase the level of specificity in their writing after only 10 to 15 days of instruction and are judged to be more creative. (DD)

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a letter-evaluation method would be as effective as the traditional letter-writing method when applied in a college level business correspondence class. One hundred twenty-nine Brigham Young University students were divided into two experimental and two control groups, and categorized according to…

This evaluation of a theme-every-day writing experience concludes that such a project has some values which reward the time a class spends preparing, reading, and giving feedback. Chapter one describes the teaching method and several features of the community college in which the theme-every-day approach to teaching composition was used. Chapter…

Because poetic writing as a method of discourse and as a tool for learning plays a significant role in many theoretical models of writing but is rarely used in practice, a study was conducted to examine the effects on 70 college students in an introductory psychology class of a mixture of poetic and transactional assignments on the subject of…

A study determined whether kindergarten teachers encouraged invented writing experiences among children to prepare them for reading and how teachers implemented invented spelling experiences in the kindergarten program. Subjects, 314 kindergarten teachers (out of 600 randomly selected kindergarten teachers in Iowa), responded to a survey of their…

This booklet is one of a series of teacher-written curriculum publications launched by the Bay Area Writing Project, each focusing on a different aspect of the teaching of composition. The introduction describes an analysis of predication that offers teachers insights into ways of helping students develop an expository thesis and study more…

The development and testing of a visual stimulus for writing, to be used in the initial assessment of liberal arts students at the University of Michigan, is described in this paper. The paper first discusses the questions considered by the university committee charged with establishing the assessment process regarding student writers' fluency,…

The findings from a study of five students undertaken to determine how unskilled college writers compose, whether their writing processes can be analyzed in a systematic manner, and what an increased understanding of those processes suggests about the nature of composing and about the manner in which writing is taught are presented in this paper.…

The purpose of this study was to determine if syntactic maturity, as measured by T-unit length, clause length, and clauses per T-unit, and if the level of reading comprehension, as measured by cloze tests and a standardized reading test, of one group each of selected fifth, seventh, and ninth graders could be influenced by the students completing…

Suggests using journal writing from the perspective of frontier settlers to teach history. Describes possible techniques for using this method and provides examples of sample journal entries. Links this methodology with research in the social studies. (KO)

The product of a course at the University of Pittsburgh, this book offers educators the opportunity to see how the acts of reading, writing, and thinking that characterize work in academia appear to those students who lack adequate preparation for such work--namely, basic writers. The introduction to the book presents an overview of the course and…