This book has an easy-to-follow-format. It supports teachers through six workshops by sharing specific strategies, procedures, and materials that worked best for students and teachers in classroom writing workshops. The book discusses the routines that helped organize and support a workshop; and presents strategies for anecdotal record-keeping,…

An alternative to the often artificial writing workshop model focuses on learning through imitation and on the writing process rather than the product. This alternative model also involves considerably more reading than a typical workshop class, requiring students to read the way writers do, with a critical understanding and an awareness of the…

In order for students to write for a general audience, they must be able to address unknown readers. Research into how successful writers perceive their audience suggests that they write to an audience who is an idealized version of themselves. Writing for an unknown audience can be a writer's search for common ground, for a set of beliefs and…

Rather than giving basic writing students handbook and workbook exercises to direct their proofreading, teachers can use a monitoring system that teaches the students to recognize problems and to systematically monitor and eliminate the difficulties. After completing two or three assignments that include several drafts, students copy out all the…

Noting that effective writing requires organization, honesty, and personal experiences, this booklet offers suggestions for teaching students to write expository essays that are serious and truthful. The first section of the booklet suggests ways to teach students to organize their ideas, while the second section discusses both the value of…

The use of a Jonathan Schwartz essay as a prose model to teach writing lends itself appropriately to classroom discussions on various aspects of autobiography and general narrative design. Such use has proved to be particularly helpful with young writers because of its deceptively simple style and language and its use of a variety of sophisticated…

The relation between reading and writing is important because tacit and possibly unwarranted assumptions underlie the theories and pedagogies which govern these processes. These assumptions are challenged by the claims that: (1) reading and writing are related in neurolinguistically specifiable ways; (2) they do not seem to be simple inverses of…

Many basic writers who possess minimal composition skills are able to articulate their thoughts but are unable to express these thoughts on paper. The talk-write method of writing rehearsal is an approach that allows these students to experience prewriting and composition processes in an enjoyable way. In the talk-write technique, the student…

Journal writing--an expressive prose that verbalizes the writer's consciousness--helps the student by fostering personal growth, reducing writing apprehension, strengthening prewriting in students' composing processes, and enhancing the development of writing abilities. Journals are places for students to write what they will, for teachers to…

Student writers should be encouraged to transform their initial writer-centered drafts into reader-based prose with discourse that is developed, shaped, and worded to take the reader's needs into consideration. The main features of writer-centered prose are egocentrism, a form that reflects the writer's thought flow, unexpressed causal relations,…

Two opposing views of composition instruction--one emphasizing the creativity and self-involvement of the student (or producer), and one emphasizing the communication produced (the product)--can be reconciled through a perspective that emphasizes the process of composition. It is in process, defined as "the act of composing" or "the act of…

One way to help students develop literary analytical skills is to combine literary transactional theory with focused free-writing activity. By adapting and using Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory, literature teachers show students the stages by which the literary experience of a creative work is recreated by the student and incorporated…

The organic theory of writing as a process and as a coherent whole implies that writing evolves from a writer's involvement with the subject. Kenneth Burke's theory of logology, the study of words about words, is a theory of composing that has invention at the center and which a writer can apply from beginning to end as needed. Since a student…

Discusses a teacher's experience writing poems with eight third and fifth graders pulled from their regular classrooms. Provides transcripts of the two poems written with the students. (SRT)

Discusses the composing processes of speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL), and suggests teaching strategies to be used with ESL writers. (MM)