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…

Writing samples were analyzed for syntactic maturity, productivity and word selection; for conventions such as tense and number markers and number agreement; and for spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Only spelling performance proved significantly different in favor of low achievers. (Author)

Describes a method for teaching composition skills based on the reading and rewriting of different texts. (AM)

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…

Students who are taught to understand and apply Korzybski's uses of semantics to their writing will learn to write more concretely. As students locate words and descriptions vertically on Korzybski's scale of abstraction levels, they will become able to perceive how meanings change when descriptions become either more general or specific, to…

Superordinates in Halliday and Hasan's analysis of cohesion are lexical items which refer to preceding terms, ideas, or actions, or to whole stretches of discourse, by naming a more inclusive category or class within which the antecedent is included. In written texts the interrelationships between superordinates and more specific terms, or…

One of the newest theories of reading states that readers rely on graphic, syntactic, and semantic cues to get meaning from a text. In the area of syntax, some recent studies not only support its importance but seem to indicate that sentence combining exercises used in writing classes may improve students' syntax sufficiently to help them in…

Examines teacher response to learner errors in composition, and proposes rules for coherent writing. (AM)

This paper first explains the diversity of the Arab World, the unifying force of Classical Arabic, and that Modern Standard Arabic, less complicated in structure and less ornate in rhetoric, is sufficiently Different from colloquial dialects to require considerable instruction in schools. For contrastive analysis to be useful as a basis for EFL…

This textbook attempts to augment the general handbook information needed in any composition class with specific information that the non-native speaker needs, for example, the distribution of determiners with the various noun subclasses, and the syntactical relationship of subordinator to subordinate clause; and to apply the techniques and…

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 book has been written to help improve the composition skills of students of English as a second language or second dialect. It has been planned for students at the advanced secondary, college, and university levels who have had some previous training in English vocabulary and grammar; it is particularly suited for a one-semester course for…