Most students avoid the reflective nature the writing process requires. Their resistance to meta-cognition, thinking about one's thinking, often means they are incapable of capitalizing on their strengths or improving upon their weaknesses. The author believes students who are familiar with writers' lives and habits will be that much more…

Understanding writing assignments is critical to college students' success as they transition from high school to postsecondary environments, but students with writing difficulties struggle to extrapolate required tasks from assignments presented in narrative form. The researcher examined the ability of students to identify assignment tasks when…

English teachers have a unique opportunity to expand and develop the way their students think. Too often, students are comfortable in thinking about reading and writing processes in a concrete or linear way. They are used to "right" or "wrong" answers in their other studies and look for the same in their English assignments. While teachers often…

Designed to encourage students to discover that grammar merely represents the patterns that exist in language, this book presents lessons on 19 grammar points: nouns; pronouns; verbs; subjects; capitalization; end punctuation; commas; sentence fragments; run-on sentences; contractions; possessives; quotation marks; adjectives; adverbs;…

Careful use of analogy can create interesting and sharp writing. Some of the problems are that an analogy imposes an attitude, there must be a counterpart, details may or may not correspond point-for-point, and an analogy starts in difference and is then brought into the realm of likeness. (TJ)

Offers seven effective learning activities for the first day of class. (MS)

Offers suggestions, based on textbook materials, for helping English-as-a-second-language students learn to write coherent English. (FL)

Describes a writing exercise in which students are asked to write questions to be submitted to a hypothetical computer. Suggestions for subsequent activities are provided. (TO)

Suggests several short, manageable activities for teaching writing, such as writing cereal box copy, characterizations, test items, and obituaries. (JL)

Offers a writing exercise, based on a comic-strip theme, that teachers can use to relieve tensions between them and their students while developing students' expressive writing skills. (RL)

Presents projects which combine creative and expository writing. (DD)

Describes efforts and results of teaching students to write free verse by recasting old poems, e.g., taking a poem heavy with rhyme, meter, and inversions and modernizing it freely using some of the techniques of free verse. (HOD)

Notes the villanelle is one of English poetry's most demanding forms. Discusses two distinct ways in which a villanelle unfolds - as a satellite or as a snowball. Describes how the meaning of the repeating lines in a snowball villanelle change and increase with each recurrence. Presents exercises for teaching the villanelle. (SG)

Presents three teachers' suggestions for teaching grammar. Discusses how the first teacher suggests studying active and passive voice, the second teacher has students construct slang dictionaries, and the third teacher uses sentence combining that engages students and encourages carryover to their writing. (SG)