There are a number of functions paragraphs play in discourse studies. For example, it encourages a writer to give adequate focus to the various aspects of his or her message; and it facilitates the identification of one idea in an essay to another idea. Some classical second language writers (for example: Stern, 1976; Halliday & Hasan, 1976;…

This report discusses AERO's 2022 analysis of student writing data -- the most extensive investigation into this area ever conducted in Australia. AERO's researchers analysed more than 10 million NAPLAN writing results, spanning 2011 to 2021, and 366 samples of students' NAPLAN writing. Overall, our research suggests that students' writing skills…

In 2022 Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) researchers analysed more than 10 million NAPLAN writing results, spanning 2011 to 2021, and 366 samples of students' NAPLAN writing. Overall, the research suggests that students' writing skills have declined over 7 years (2011 to 2018), with many high school students significantly behind…

This article introduces a modification of the sentence completion task that acquaints students with various types of informational text structures (e.g., cause-effect, compare-contrast) and challenges their higher order reading and writing skills. When the individual sentences comprising an expository paragraph are intermingled with unrelated…

When the literature and the research results on sentence combining are analyzed, they seem to provide an expanded meaning of sentence combining and reasons for its effects on the writing of some students. Gains in syntactic maturity alone do not explain why sentence combining affects positively the writing of some students, nor does the fact that…

A principal components analysis was conducted to determine whether the measures of essays made by the computer could be grouped into factors. Six factors (fluency, spelling, diction, sentence structure, punctuation, and paragraphing) were identified. (Author)

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)

A crucial concept in Francis Christensen's principles of writing involves the "addition," which may be construed as any grammatical unit that is not a main clause. Obviously the effect of rhetorical writing derives mainly from the number of additions as well as from their placement and function within the single sentence. By means of…

The effect on student writing of Communications I classes at the University of Northern Colorado was tested using 95 students studying under 5 different teachers and 15 students who had participated in a previous study. Two paragraphs, one written at the beginning of the term and one at the end of the term were rated for organization, development,…

One of six related documents, making up a U.S. Air Force correspondence course, this publication deals with effective writing and emphasizes the sentence as the basic unit of written communication. Part one focuses on internal sentence punctuation and covers the use of the comma, semicolon, colon, period, capital, abbreviations, and numbers. Part…

To determine whether significant differences exist between a class taught generative rhetoric and a class taught traditional methods of writing, a strategy was developed for teaching the generative rhetoric of the sentence and the paragraph in a first-semester composition course composed of average students. The 56 subjects were randomly assigned…

In the writing of Matthew Arnold, integration, one great impression rather than many great individual lines, is the most important goal. In his essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," the "blocs" of his thought are in sets of two, three, or even four sentences: in effect, he writes much like a poet, in couplets,…

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…

Algebraic equations and geometric forms are useful in teaching and learning composition. Algebraic equations can illustrate the modular nature of paragraph structures and can be refined by students to describe types of paragraphs. Discussion of the "slippery" nature of words and their power of transformation can be a lecture topic as the class…