To show the shortcomings of concentrating on the teaching of sentences and paragraphs in basic writing courses, this paper points out problems encountered by one teacher who attempted to use that approach. The paper describes how the teacher discovered that teaching the rules and concepts of grammar and writing stifles students' creativity,…

In this K-8 writing skills curriculum, developed in Skokie (Illinois), the objectives are presented in a "mastery" format so that student achievement can be assessed. The document begins with a statement of philosophy, and guidelines for teachers to use in implementing the program, and then describes the curriculum format, which focuses on the…

Composed by English teachers at the elementary, secondary, and college levels, this book describes practical methods for teaching writing. Part one contains essays on issues related to teaching writing, such as motivation, evaluation, and teaching sequence. Part two describes more than 100 practical lessons for classroom use, each of which…

This paper proposes a study of the writing performance of superior twelfth graders and college English majors in three types of discourse: expressive, explanatory, and persuasive. The primary purpose of the study is descriptive, though the results of the descriptive analysis will permit a comparison of twelfth graders' writing with college…

The teaching of writing skills is such a complex and timely process that it militates its introduction and reinforcement from the outset of English as a second language instruction. This paper presents and describes writing activities for beginning, intermediate, advanced, and transitional levels. Among the beginning level activities suggested are…

The production of a book review journal by students is suggested as a way of encouraging reading and of developing clear, expository writing. Guidelines are provided for the sequential development of such a journal. Criteria are offered for evaluating fiction and nonfiction books, with examples of annotations featuring style, period or setting of…

College freshmen, when confronted with an essay question using broad concepts such as "society,""freedom," and "progress," seldom clarify or define the concepts in their essays before expressing their opinions or solutions. Students who read without interpreting the concepts implied by certain words shortchange the…

The basic components of the basic writing program at Rutgers University, designed to prepare disadvantaged students for the core course in English, are a combination of reading and writing activities with as much individualized instruction as possible. The components include three courses, a learning center, and an annual workshop in the teaching…

The Learning to Write Sentence by Sentence curriculum was developed at the College of Marin (California) to promote increased student awareness of quality in communication by providing concentrated exercise in writing. This self-paced course forces the student to think before writing, by using rhetorical and complicated instructions on how to…

Teachers at Western Illinois University help improve the self-image of students in college remedial English courses in the following ways: (1) they try to alleviate students' feelings of failure through such methods as stressing the acceptability of spoken dialects but pointing out the practical need for writing in Standard English, and…

Writing can be taught most effectively when teachers build the disorienting characteristics of reading literature into the inventive stages (prewriting and revision) of writing literary interpretations. The reading of literature and the process of composing interpretive essays are both different and similar. They are similar because they are both…

Magazines and comic strips are two readily available cultural artifacts that can be used by expository writing teachers. Magazines are a particularly rich source of referential material for the composition classroom, offering examples of various prose styles and formal structures. One possibility for using magazines in writing classes is a…

Current literature indicates a growing interest in the development of individualized, self-paced, learning systems within community college courses in order to accommodate the differing learning abilities of non-traditional students. To assess student preferences for such instruction as opposed to traditional, lecture/discussion teaching, an…

In this collection of 18 essays drawn from reports of the Yale Conferences on the Teaching of English, high school teachers present ways to handle problems relevant to all English classrooms. Essays on the teaching of language include a discussion of grammar, a definition and illustration of language study, and a consideration of the kinds of…

This paper demonstrates the compatability of Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) and George Campbell's Four Forms of Discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) and synthesizes them to form an ordered yet flexible writing model that can be used in composition instruction. Within the context of…