One of a number of reports of a study of the range of written tasks that can be completed successfully by 14- to 16-year-old students, this booklet suggests that argument is an important means of learning and an inevitable and proper concern of English teachers. The discussion rejects the characteristic forms of argument questions found on most…

Analysis of 24 sets of journal entries, drafts, and revisions of papers written by college students in literature/composition courses suggested three stages in the process of reading and writing about literature. In the progressive stage, which is based on theories of transactional literary analysis, brief writing exercises, such as journal…

Each written by a classroom teacher and based on the experience of that teacher working with his or her students, the articles in this collection are an extension of the Bay Area Writing Project assumptions. Many contain samples of writing done by students in response to the writing tasks described. After a preamble that discusses what is already…

To explore student facility with argumentative writing, 40 persuasive essays of 5th, 7th, and 11th grade students were analyzed for their relative percentage of reporting (narrating), interpreting, generalizing, and speculative sentences. Fifth and seventh graders were found to use significantly more narrative and fewer generalizations than older…