With tips on punctuation, style, grammar and essay structure, this handy guide provides succinct and practical guidance on students most common areas of concern in their written work. Each tip is supplemented by authentic examples of student writing, suggested re-writes, and appropriate self-help exercises. This book contains four parts. Part I:…

This exercise is intended to teach the sense of sentences and their place in the larger fabric of paragraphs as they are woven into organized papers. Based on the five-paragraph theme (introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion), the exercise divides "What I Haved Lived For," the prologue to "The Autobiography of Bertrand…

In spite of the growth in popularity of sentence combining over the last 20 years, few teachers use it in technical writing classes, either because the exercises are inappropriate or because teachers fear that sentence combining will teach students to write longer rather than better sentences. Sentence combining can, however, teach technical…

Students in grades 4, 5, or 6 can learn to write more concretely, accurately, and deliberately by employing three strategies: (1) elimination of those words or phrases that garble meaning or repeat unnecessarily; (2) substitution of more specific, concrete, and generally more appropriate expressions for ones that are vague and unimaginative; and…

Argues that there is sufficient reason on both theoretical grounds and the results of research and demonstration to encourage and include writing as one aspect of a reading improvement program. Describes several writing activities for use in such a program. (FL)

James Joyce's use of interior monologue (the interior self of the character is given directly, as though the reader were overhearing an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling flowing through the character's mind) can help basic writers in developmental classes. Students can be given excerpts from Joyce and asked to turn the sentence…

Applicable to kindergarten through grade 12, the individualized Language Arts composition program is based upon actual student experiences. Once student writing samples have been plotted on a diagnostic grid, the program's manual provides teachers with specific methods for meeting students' needs. Uniting cognitive, affective, and creative…

Offered as a guide to teachers of basic writers (remedial or developmental students), this book contains activities for setting and achieving goals, for motivating reluctant beginning writers, and for practicing, stretching, and mastering basic writing skills. The six chapters of the book present ways of approaching rhetorical strategies and…

A curriculum for intermediate composition for students of English as a second language is presented based on the use of levels of specificity as an organizing principle. The course objective is for students to write well-planned, coherent paragraphs acceptable to the American academic audience, within limited formats. Two additional fundamentals…

Foreign students in American colleges and universities experience difficulty with various aspects of English composition, especially grammar, mechanics, syntax, sentence and paragraph structure, and report writing. One way to deal with the situation is to set up a composition course in ESL in which the specific problems of non-native speakers are…

The purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness with which composition skills could be taught by the traditional theme-assignment approach and by an experimental method using weekly multiple-choice composition tests in lieu of theme writing. The weekly tests were based on original but typical first-draft compositions and covered problems…

The experimental program in remedial composition described in this interim report was designed on the assumption that students could best learn to write minimally acceptable compositions by imitating paragraph and essay models which have been divided into a series of incremental steps. The objectives of the program were to develop a heuristic…

Reflecting current practices in the teaching of writing, the exercises in this compilation were drawn from the journal "Exercise Exchange." The articles are arranged into six sections: sources for writing; prewriting; modes for writing; writing and reading; language, mechanics, and style; and revising, responding, and evaluating. Among the topics…

Designed for use within language arts programs as well as in the content areas, this handbook provides a continuum of activities for developing writing skills in grades five through twelve. The activities, arranged according to a diagnostic grid sheet provided for evaluation of student progress, offer practice in perception of task (point of view…

The aim of this course for grades 10-12 is to develop in students their command of language through their use of it. It tries to guide the student through the actual process of composition, avoiding the treatment of the pre-writing stage and the writer's situation. The instruction material is divided into six categories (Conciseness and Clarity,…