Offers a rationale for assessing entering students writing skills. Argues that locally developed writing skills tests are more valid than commercial tests. Suggests that teachers draw on their own experiences when constructing tests, develop holistic scoring guides, and involve a broad range of educators, parents, and students in scoring the…

Suggests that error analysis can be manageable for teachers and instructive for basic writers. Explains five critical principles of error analysis in basic writing: understand students' intentions; set consistent priorities; analyze for clarification of intentions; encourage students to set their own goals; and help students objectify their…

Describes a collaborative-writing assessment system that rewards each student both for the group's performance and for individual participation. Presents a survey of student attitudes toward an assignment incorporating the assessment system, and reveals that students perceived the assessment as fair and effective. (MM)

Examines science textbook language and determines some characteristics of them: distant authorial voice, concern for precision, limited context, limited syntax, and rhetorical model. Suggests three further researcher needs. (YP)

Agreement between two independent reviews of each of 278 manuscripts was compared on an overall recommendation and on specific rating items. Agreement between reviewers on separate dimensions, the unweighted sum of the dimensions, and various weighted sums was no better than that for the overall recommendation itself. (SLD)

Describes a writing assignment incorporated into the requirements for a production/operations management course. Provides an evaluative procedure for this assignment based on the analytic approach to writing. (MM)

Describes an experiment designed to determine the reaction of employment interviewers to local lexical and syntactic errors in business and technical writing of non-native speakers of English. Reports that these judges find local syntactic errors more serious than local lexical errors. (MM)

Illustrates the strength of the Socratic method by showing its applicability to a troubled student. Discusses feedback in the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, examining the purpose, nature, and focus of response. (MS)

A quantitative analysis of the use of conjuncts in two genres of written English, business news stories and academic journal articles, revealed a much higher frequency of conjunct use in the journal articles. A brief discussion focuses on the pedagogical implications of this study, and suggestions for further research are presented. (26…

Analysis of five biology and five biochemistry professional journal articles' use of the English present perfect tense revealed that both disciplines used the tense most frequently in the introduction and discussion sections, typically conveying the meaning of a past experience with current relevance. (CB)

Examination of English as a second language students' (N=59) preference for and views on feedback on written work revealed three categories of students: receptors (46 percent); semi-resistor (41 percent); and resistors (13 percent). Students' progression from English learners to apprentices in their chosen discipline increased their restrictions…

Evaluates and analyzes four recent theoretical and pedagogical books concerned with writing portfolios for teachers of writing. Discusses various issues and theoretical concerns of practitioners advocating the use of portfolios. (HB)

Provides an overview of the conversational roles taken on by students and teachers during college-level writing conferences. Uses the performative theory of Erving Goffman to analyze these role patterns. Illuminates the specific performative demands presented by writing conferences on both students and teachers. (HB)

Outlines a text-based, interactionist approach toward writing and written communication. A brief analysis of the working drafts and revisions of a first-year college student's essay is offered to illustrate how key textual features function reflexively to establish and sustain the evolving but mutually held rational grounds of school writing and…

To investigate the effect on item parameter estimation of pooling the raters' ratings and to examine the information content of 2 types of writing samples, the partial credit model was fit to 2,000 writing samples from secondary students that had been holistically scored. Implications for test construction are discussed. (SLD)