This study compared the preferred writing topics of urban and rural middle school students. Eighth graders (n = 205) responded to a brief survey of preferred writing topics in the descriptive writing genres of real or imagined stories, reports, and opinions. While some preferred writing topics were divergent such as society, crime, and violence,…

Unlike less skilled writers, who are intensely writer-oriented, skilled writers of personal essays and autobiographies are reader-oriented and demonstrate a conscious concern for their external audience. Student writers can develop a sense of an external audience by analyzing parallel autobiographical text selections of skilled and unskilled…

An approach to teaching expository writing and research in support of that approach are presented in this book. The first section of the book discusses writing from given information, a technique by which teachers give students collections of nonverbal data (charts, graphs, maps, and other pictorial information) that the students must organize in…

An Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I English/Writing project was continued at two Phoenix Union high schools, Carl Hayden and North High Schools, in 1974-75. Although the objectives and instructional method (individualized, diagnostic, prescriptive approach) were the same at the two schools, the entry level skills and abilities of the…

This study was undertaken to investigate approaches fifth grade children of similar mental ability follow when writing narrative compositions, to identify procedures unique to good and poor writers, and to observe sex differences relative to quality of written expression and ability to verbalize concerning the writing process. A sample of 230…

Compares the effects of an enriched syllabus including extensive reading and frequent writing assignments on English descriptive writing performance at four form levels for Cantonese-speaking students participating in three English programs: (1) regular plus unrelated (mathematics) enrichment; (2) regular plus extensive reading; and (3) regular…