Describes an assignment that urges expository writers to pursue their own interests and create a fully developed prose project that they will be eager to share. (HTH)

Describes a method for involving disabled readers with Shakespeare texts by means of reading aloud, writing, and workshops. (HTH)

Presents a descriptive exercise, also useful for technical writing, that provides a real reader and a strong sense of the nature of descriptive writing. Students are given sketches of an art piece that they must describe for a museum for identification. (HTH)

Examines a number of language activities in educational software, noting that most focus on surface structure and conventions, thus closing off students' options rather than expanding them. Discusses how, by improvising with word processors, teachers can tailor activities to help students explore and reflect on their reading and writing…

Describes a journalism writing assignment in which students compile a specialized style manual with computer and business terms. (HTH)

Recommends having students keep a reading journal on reading assignments as a way of getting them involved in reading, thinking, and discussion. (EL)

Suggests methods for improving the quality of essay exams when teaching literature. (DF)

Indicates how the philosophic technique known as "thought experimentation" can be used profitably by composition teachers. Provides two examples. (EL)

Describes a sequence of writing exercises that synthesizes current work on expressive discourse, learning theory, and classical exercises of the kind that are represented in Quintilian's progymnasmata. (HOD)

By focusing their attention closely on a written text, cloze passages help students learn more about how language works--the interaction of vocabulary and syntax, the influence of diction on style, the important grammatical relationships between words in a sentence, and the logical relationships between sentences in a paragraph. (HOD)

Describes a writing assignment designed to help students incorporate into a single essay Moffett's writer-subject progressions: dramatization, narration, exposition, and logical argumentation. Describes one student's progress through successive drafts to arrive at this goal, and how discussions of her draft helped the other students. (HTH)

Describes an assignment to focus students' attention on the thinking process in which students write dialogues that reproduce concretely the dialectic movement of a formal argument. Includes a more advanced exercise in which students' address the remarks of literary critics. (HTH)

Suggests that proposal writing can benefit technical writing students by enhancing skills in using persuasion devices with technology. Presents three rhetorical structural steps (beginning, middle, and end) that reinforce a proposal writing exercise suitable for both university and business applications. (HTH)

Provides a rationale for allowing students to write in journals that the teacher will never read. Suggests requiring students to write responses to their journal writing at the end of the semester, which would be shared with the teacher and the rest of the class. Includes a sample response. (HTH)

Outlines a basic writing skills course organized around the process of transcribing reading and lecture notes from students' other classes. (HTH)