Teachers can create talented writers in their classrooms by designing a course in which students are given the tools and the techniques they need to develop their talents. Writers need (1) an overview of the writing processes, which includes choices about language purposes, register (such as formal, informal, or casual), patterns of organization,…

While attempting to refine and redefine the composing process, rhetoric teachers have overlooked research showing how the brain's visual and verbal components interrelate. Recognition of the brain's visual potential can mean more than the use of media with the written word--it also has implications for the writing process itself. For example,…

This paper presents a narrative account of how the process of discovery pertained to a college instructor's experience in teaching writing, offering it as a potential methodology for other teachers to consider in their own and their students' writing. The first two parts of the paper illustrate the process of primary and secondary invention in…

Every writing program contains implicit information on the amount of writing that should be assigned, how the essays should be evaluated, the type of grammar--if any--students should study, and the type of composition instruction that will be most effective. Research has not identified an optimal level of writing frequency, and although frequent…

Logical strategies used in informative writing include factuality, comprehensiveness, and surprise value, which provides the focus of the paper and guides both the organization and the thoroughness with which each subtopic must be covered. Failure to teach surprise value is the main problem behind the uninteresting reports that teachers must face…

A brief overview of the history of teaching writing reveals a shift from an emphasis on the composed product to the composing process and provides writing teachers who work one-to-one with students with a theoretical seven-stage model of the composing process: starting-point, exploration, incubation, illumination, composing, reformulation, and…

Most people are taught writing as a product rather than as a process. Whether the process is prewriting, writing, and postwriting; or planning, writing, and revising, teachers must be concerned with helping students discover and develop the process that works best for them. Thus it is the writing teacher's responsibility to teach students how to…

This guide provides a rationale and suggests activities for teachers in all subject matter areas to use in helping their students to write. Some of the activities described are interdisciplinary in nature and lend themselves to team teaching arrangements; other activities are suggested that support the integration of writing into given content…

This paper specifies the content of composition instruction, some of which can be incorporated into material to be presented by and practiced on a computer. It describes instructional outcomes within the context of an instructional model of the composing situation and discusses them under the following headings: (1) the composing problem, (2)…

This is one in a series of eight discussion pamphlets produced by the Writing Across the Curriculum Project dealing with some of the issues connected with writing in the schools and their relation to learning. The seven papers in this pamphlet were drawn from a seminar involving a small number of science teachers and cover a variety of topics,…

Too often college composition students see language as an end in itself, rather than as a means to realization of self and world, and teachers need to establish a classroom environment that stimulates and demands that students use their language to find out about themselves. Techniques helpful in shaping composition classes toward this end…

Illustrates the debate between (1) those holding the mechanic view that form must be imposed on writing, enabling the selection of relevant details, and (2) those holding the neo-Coleridgean organic view that as one writes one's thinking assumes shape, structure being indivisible from content. Contrasts textbooks by R. Decker and D. Murray. (JG)

Describes a basic writing program which provides an enabling environment to give students opportunities and a plan for composing sentences and texts and interacting with readers, through such techniques as collaborative learning, writing as process, and sentence combining. Offers profiles of typical basic writers including examples of their work.…

Presents and discusses three confessions regarding the effects computers have had on writing processes and products of three writing teachers. Suggests approaches to the use of word processing in composition courses and to research on such use. (SD)

Explains ways of helping students to analyze and correct their spelling errors. Emphasizes the difference between composing well and using correct spelling. (EL)