An analysis of the kinds of sentences used by students in sample ETS English Composition Test essays, and a survey of some of the actual weaknesses of these papers (e.g., shifting subjects, use of incorrect idiom, and inaccurate or incorrect word choices or usages) point to real gaps in student writing skills. Elements found in good papers (e.g.,…

The purpose of this study was to determine what effects the Christensen Rhetoric Program, a method of teaching sentence and paragraph development, had upon the attitudes of 43 black college freshmen just entering Tennessee State University and upon the persistence of these students in using free modifiers after a lapse of time and instruction.…

Textual puzzles may be used in freshman composition or introduction to writing courses to emphasize word order and subject-predicate agreement. These sentence puzzles demonstrate that the English language depends primarily upon word order to convey meaning, and assist students to avoid blending statement and question word order in their sentences…

Data presented in this report are the results of the special assessment of writing mechanics conducted during the 1978-79 school year by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools (DoDDS). The purposes of the study were (1) to examine writing abilities of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students enrolled…

This workshop guide is designed to help civil service students both learn to use good grammar and develop their technical writing skills. Discussed are such topics as nouns, gender, number, person and case, appositives, pronouns, mood, verbs, (transitive and intransitive), adjectives and adverbs, comparisons, articles, conjunctions, infinitives,…

The foreign student in an American university must be able to communicate in English, orally and in writing, well enough to do college-level academic work. The college or university which admits foreign students has the responsibility either to require a certain level of English proficiency or to provide the means for the student to get the…

Two articles on sentence construction and eight on the paragraph comprise this publication. Francis Christensen contributes four articles on (1) the use of loose, cumulative sentences, (2) sentence openers, with illustrations from Hemingway, (3) a generative rhetoric for the paragraph, and (4) the formation of principles of paragraph composition…

Thirteen curriculum strands that together constitute a framework for competent writing are detailed in this writing program guide. Each strand discussed begins with a statement of the expected learning outcome called a "program goal" and is further organized in a kindergarten through grade 12 sequence with objectives listed for each grade level.…

The present study reports on exploratory research to determine whether the Aluminum Paragraph, a sentence-combining exercise developed by O'Donnell (Hunt, 1970) to measure the development of syntactic complexity in the writing of native speakers of English, can also serve as a measure of the active syntactic proficiency of learners of English as a…

This competency test package, one of a series of test packages for office occupations education, contains a list of performance objectives; a pool of objective questions matched with these performance objectives; a sample, 50-point objective test; and several performance test activities. The package also includes complete directions for the…