Discusses the use of the comma in Spanish and gives examples of its use in Spanish literature. (NCR)

Discusses the uses of the comma in Spanish and shows a poem that can be interpreted in different ways with different punctuation. (NCR)

Outlines the basic elements and classroom applications of "word grammar," a form of sector (tagmemic) analysis to be used in standard English instruction. (RL)

Almost every discussion of technical or scientific writing style mentions the passive voice as a stylistic choice to avoid. However, the passive voice does have legitimate uses in technical and scientific writing--the problem is to define the appropriate or effective uses and the inappropriate or ineffective ones. An examination of passive voice…

Grammar can have meaning and be of use to the learner depending upon the methods of instruction that are being used. The eight traditional parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverbs, prepositional phrase, conjunction, pronouns, and interjection) can be made useful for learners by giving concrete, semi-concrete, and abstract examples when…

Maintaining that two kinds of ambiguity--ambiguous prepositional phrases and ambiguous modification of conjoined elements--account for a large number of ambiguous sentences in technical writing, this paper presents an algebraic analysis of each kind of ambiguity. It then suggests a number of ways in which each ambiguity may be unclear. By using…

Points out that writing errors of journalism students can result from faulty thought patterns involving thinking in sentence fragments, personifying objects, using bureaucratic abstractions, and condensing complex ideas; examines ways of dealing with bureaucratic coding and compressed sentences. (Conclusion of a two-part article.) (GT)

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

Suggests that teaching students to achieve coherence involves teaching them what it means to plan and to move up and down a hierarchy of abstraction as well as teaching them to build cohesive links into their writing. Describes a program for teaching coherence. (RL)

This concluding article in a series concerning the use of the comma in Spanish gives specific examples of its use from Spanish literature. Concluding remarks outline the major purposes of the comma. (NCR)

The punctuation system presented in this paper has explanatory power insofar as it explains how good writers punctuate. The paper notes that good writers have learned, through reading, the differences among a hierarchy of marks and acquired a sense of independent clauses that allows them to use the hierarchy, along with a reader-sensitive notion…

Stylistics, the art of making effective choices in writing, depends on synonymy. This means that writers, depending on the purpose, the audience, and the context of their messages, will rephrase those messages to improve their effectiveness. Paraphrasing messages to fit the needs of particular situations depends on a number of stylistic variables…

Readers are "dumb" because they are not privy to the mind and intentions of the writer; and the failure of the unsuccessful writer is a failure to forecast what it is going to be like to be a dumb reader of the document. Sample sentences from students' writing illustrate the following types of writing problems, which force the reader to examine…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

The clearest writing style is one in which the grammatical structures of a sentence most redundantly support the perceived semantic structure; a textured style is one in which the syntactic complexity invests a sentence with distinctive force. (DD)