Since acceptable writing is essential to success in job training programs and in many entry-level jobs, a writing sample was included in the Training and Employment Prerequisites Survey, a multiple-choice test about skills like mechanics, usage, and spelling. The two writing prompts asked students to give directions for finding a location in a…

One year after sixth grade students participated in an instructional intervention experiment aimed at teaching reflective planning skills in writing, a followup study focused on evidence of reflectivity in attitudes and metacognitive knowledge concerning writing. This study was conducted with 16 experimental and 13 control students. Data were…

Intended for students taking the Grade 3 Language Arts Achievement Test in Alberta, Canada, this booklet contains the writing portion of the test, which requires the student to write an imaginative composition in response to a brief passage. The booklet contains space both for planning the composition and for writing the finished work. (EL)

Universities with limited resources are being pressured to cover more material within their degree programs. Because of this, schools are looking to integrate material from different classes. This paper sets out to determine if students can learn business writing within the context of another class, specifically, an information systems class. The…

A rating instrument for describing nine structural characteristics of written compositions is presented and explained. (JH)

Media advocates too often obscure the extent to which media production is dependent on print. (JH)

This paper discusses four strategies used by the author in college English courses to discourage fraud yet to allow students enough freedom to conduct original research. The strategies include generating "topic lists," in hope of beating term paper "clearinghouses," which must certainly have a time-lag on the topics in their…

This paper describes the development and design of English 118 at Drake University. The course, geared primarily for college juniors and seniors, devotes proportionate shares of time to the theory, practice, and analysis of written expression, oral interpretation, and nonverbal communication. Six course options enable a wide variety of students to…

The Gunning Fog Index of readability indicates both the average length of words and the difficult words (three or more syllables) in written material. This document describes a business communication course at Wayne State University in which students calculate the Gunning Fog Index of two of their writing assignments with the aid of the…

Francis Christensen's Rhetoric Program stresses narrative-descriptive and expository writing, and offers a guide for the structure of the paragraph. In this approach, students develop their composition skills by writing sentences similar to model sentences that Christensen has extracted from the works of successful writers. The basic model is the…

The poetry unit presented in this paper is designed to teach high school students how to write poetry through personal observation, journal writing, and small group discussion. Using the unit, students progress through the stages of writing according to the following steps: observing a familiar person and noting words and phrases about that…

The teaching of poetry can be used as a language experience approach to develop good writing skills in elementary and high school students. This paper discusses the techniques a "poet-in-residence" employed to help students create poems and, indirectly, to teach the function of such writing skills as parts of speech, punctuation, and…

This paper describes individualized learning, a form of individualized instruction that emphasizes students' self-paced learning progress within a tutorial teaching structure, as it was used in a freshman composition program. The teachers first determined the composition skills that their students should have acquired upon completion of the three…

Seven language arts booklets present samples of student writing, teaching suggestions and resources for an enrichment program for gifted elementary students. Focused on in each of the booklets are the following topics (sample subtopics in parentheses): introductory activities (word and sentence expansion, imagery, and patterns in poetry); short…