With evidence supporting the belief that as a way of decreasing errors sentence combining offers a number of advantages for developmental writing students, a college composition instructor gave 19 developmental writing students five weeks of concentrated sentence combining study with no other instruction or writing practice. The sessions…

Controversy has characterized the research on writing. On the one side are those who state that, to evaluate achievement in writing, evaluate the writing of students. On the other side are those pointing out the problems associated with direct measures of writing such as low reliability and high cost in terms of time and often dollars. The purpose…

The increase in adult college students who have been away from formal education for several years and who are seeking degrees to match the status level they have achieved in business requires a specially organized composition course. Two strategies will keep the course organization and content professional, yet meet individual students' needs in…

Proposing the theory that adult basic writers can learn to write better if they are taught to understand the mental processes that writing requires, this paper presents a brief teaching guide for systematic instruction in these processes. The paper first examines how ideas develop and then outlines the mental processes in rhetoric. Discussions of…

Until writing researchers understand how students respond to teacher marking techniques in composition, they risk prescribing strategies that waste teachers' instructional time. For this reason a study with a participant/observation methodology was conducted to describe and interpret student responses to writing instruction methods. The five-month…

As a reaction to the popularization of so-called "discrete point" tests of language proficiency, that is, tests that evaluate control of a sample of specific linguistic items, a number of testing formats which provide a more global, integrative measure of language proficiency have been proposed or revived in recent years. Some of these measures…

Freshman composition students at a community college in Maryland participated in a study to determine whether the talk-write method of writing instruction would have a more positive effect on freshman writing than would more conventional methods of instruction. Four classes totaling 58 students were randomly divided into an experimental and a…

A pilot study was conducted on the student characteristics associated with changes in student writing apprehension. Data were collected from 300 students in freshman composition courses and 300 students in advanced (junior year) composition courses. These students completed the Writing Attitude Questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of…

Three types of journal writing used by a teacher in her community college English classrooms are (1) the reading journal, in which students respond to course materials that they have been assigned; (2) the "sensorium," a writing unit devoted to detailed, specific descriptions of what the student sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells;…

The Basic Skills Assessment (BSA) is a national secondary level testing program which provides secure tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. It is designed to identify students who need additional instruction in the basic skills so they may be helped to reach the school district's secondary school graduation requirements. One of the BSA's…

A study was conducted to examine the relationship between apprehension and the quality of writing when that writing was aimed at a distant and at a familiar audience. Fifty-eight freshman English students from a two-year college were given a questionnaire to assess their level of writing apprehension. They were then asked to write two in-class…

A workshop for college engineering and business faculty in how to teach writing in their classrooms is one route to improving student writing skills. Any faculty development program needs strong administrative support. To overcome the problems both in condensing a knowledge of writing into a short session and in the objections of faculty to the…

The hypothesis that professional writers would be judged superior to college students on both holistic and analytic evaluations was only partially confirmed when four teacher-evaluators rated the anonymously submitted compositions of 64 college students and 5 professional writers. On the holistic scale the professionals did not distinguish…

An exploration of writing anxiety suggests that it is a normal form of behavior rather than a pathology, but that it varies in degrees of its dysfunctionality. Excerpts from the log books of college students in a writing anxiety workshop illustrate four broad categories of writing anxiety: procrastination, feeling emotionally distressed, thinking…

In the past, writers have chosen stylistic devices within the parameters of the traditional grammar of style, "Grammar A," characterized by analyticity, coherence, and clarity. But many contemporary writers are creating a new grammar of style, "Grammar B," characterized by synchronicity, discontinuity, and ambiguity, which…