Award-winning author Carolyn Coman has made a career out of writing stories for children and young adults as well as teaching writing to people of all ages. She believes that the essence of good writing, no matter the genre, is the ability to craft a solid story. In this innovative book, Carolyn provides advice, strategies, and inspiration…

Outlines a procedure to help students revise their writing. (JL)

Technical writers involved in an institutional writing project need some way of viewing the raw material globally before writing. In this way they can build a framework which can be used for different types of information. This is accomplished through a task analysis meeting that highlights the following preparatory steps prior to writing: (1)…

The writing process depends heavily on linguistic, psycho-perceptual, and psycho-motor abilities. If a student has a significant weakness in one of these major trait clusters, then thinking will suffer and he or she may experience great difficulty in writing. The process of writing can be broken down into four main phases, which can be labeled…

Describes a technical proposal writing assignment modeled after the conditions in industry. Provides a paradigm of government project proposals and then outlines the stages of the assignment that allow student to rework and revise, thereby discouraging students from writing formulaic and superficial proposals. (SRT)

Describes a writing assignment in which students must complete a page of coherent prose using only one word containing the letter "n." The exercise serves as a prelude to the concepts of revision and of passive and active vocabularies. (HTH)

Writers' comments on writing can help teachers incorporate within their classrooms the idea that writing is a process of discovery. They can remind students and teachers how important enthusiasm, motivation, and reinforcement are. Even though such comments are not saying anything new, saying the same thing in new terminology can lead to new…

Focusing on the teacher's role in helping students to be creative in writing while expressing themselves more clearly, concisely, and accurately, the first four chapters of this guide offer a simple three-step process with strategies for teachers to follow when teaching writing. First, the guide discusses how the teacher can more thoroughly…

Style is teachable and learnable, but literary models should not be introduced for imitation until the basic writer has already developed some fluency in writing; then literature can provide students with examples of experiences that they can internalize, store away, and draw upon in their own writing. A brainstorming exercise, "the messy…

Describes a technical writing assignment designed to teach (1) audience awareness, (2) strategies for analytical problem solving, (3) an understanding of the patterns of organization that make the information clear to the intended audience, and (4) a mastery of the editing skills needed to make writing correct and concise. (SRT)

Designed for students who have grammatical problems, the syntactic approach presented in this paper helps explain the process of revision, and should be used only after a student has written a draft. The paper suggests that the students' hypothetical objective can be to understand how every word in any sentence is syntactically connected to the…

Describes the development and implementation of a writing project for which students wrote letters to senior citizens. Reflects on students' writing improvement and positive attitude toward writing. (SRT)

Presents an exercise that guides basic writing students in their choices, requiring them to make evaluative annotations of each sentence in the draft of a paragraph. Includes (1) a set of questions that incorporate criteria for a sound paragraph and serve heuristically for the revision of the draft, and (2) a student example of the procedure. (HTH)

Almost 600 questionnaires were sent to private and public colleges and universities in a nationwide survey of their revision practices in advanced composition courses. Among the results were the following: (1) the teacher figured most powerfully in any revision activity; (2) a single mode of revision was the prevailing practice; (3) private…

"Aerobic writing" is a writing center strategy designed to keep students in writing "shape." Like aerobic exercise, aerobic writing is sustained for a certain length of time and done on a regular basis at prescribed time intervals. The program requires students to write at least two times a week for approximately an hour each time. Students write,…